This fantastic film I'd never even heard of until today, made by the creator of the immortal Freaks (1932) and Dracula (1931), Tod Browning. It's never even been released on any home video format before, but the recent blu-ray has been lovingly restored, and now, almost a hundred years later, looks the best it ever has, with one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard accompany a silent, care of the long-time David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley, who adds a woozy, warped, disorientating atmosphere you can cut with a knife, along with painstakingly-added sound effects, all of which enhance the experience enormously. Every silent film should be accompanied in this way.
Like Freaks, Mystic is the story of carnival folk with a moral code of their own, this time a phony psychic act that travels from Hungary to New York to try get rich by fleecing the wealthy before falling foul of the law. It loses steam a little towards the end, but the early parts put me in mind of Nightmare Alley (1947) and Varieté (released the same year, 1925), and it's not far off being as good as them both, which is quite the complement. A splendid discovery.
7.5/10.
Like Freaks, Mystic is the story of carnival folk with a moral code of their own, this time a phony psychic act that travels from Hungary to New York to try get rich by fleecing the wealthy before falling foul of the law. It loses steam a little towards the end, but the early parts put me in mind of Nightmare Alley (1947) and Varieté (released the same year, 1925), and it's not far off being as good as them both, which is quite the complement. A splendid discovery.
7.5/10.