“I will become a giant, a titan who scatters the gods and the laws into a swirl like withered leaves!”
The sequel to Fritz Lang’s classic silent film begins with a – failed – assassination attempt on prosecutor von Wenk. Carozza, a dancer, is arrested because she is suspected of complicity in the crime. When Mabuse learns that Carozza is willing to testify, he has poison brought to her, with which she kills herself.
Another assassination attempt on von Wenk again fails, for which Mabuse’s servant Pesch is held responsible. But before he can testify, he too is murdered. After Mabuse has also killed Count Told in order to seize his wife, he disguises himself and seeks out the public prosecutor to accuse Told’s psychiatrist Weltmann of having driven his patient to suicide. To verify this claim, von Wenk attends one of Weltmann’s group sessions, but Weltmann is none other than Mabuse in disguise. Mabuse hypnotizes von Wenk and orders him on a suicidal car ride. At the last minute, the prosecutor is saved – and now he knows who is behind all the atrocities. Mabuse takes refuge in a forgery workshop. There, the souls of his victims haunt him. When von Wenk enters the workshop, he finds a deranged Mabuse who has finally gone completely insane.
The dramatic finale of Fritz Lang’s two-part epic about a megalomaniac criminal striving for world domination is a parable about the fantasies of omnipotence of an omnipresent, invisible adversary. Even a hundred years after it was written, it has lost none of its relevance in a present threatened by autocrats.
