A brief moment, and nothing is as it was. Lorenz Lubota, a modest town clerk and secret poet, is hit by a horse-drawn carriage. The young woman on the box is called Veronika, the daughter of a wealthy ironmonger. Captivated by her beauty, Lubota increasingly loses touch with reality. He pursues a phantom, and ruins himself. He neglects his work, gets involved in fraud, and becomes an accomplice in a burglary. In the end, there is a murder, a conviction - and a last glimmer of hope in the form of Marie, the bookbinder's daughter.

PHANTOM is a German silent film by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau from 1922, based on a novel by Gerhart Hauptmann. Murnau, who would soon leave Germany for Hollywood, stood for a modern, cosmopolitan cinema that resisted the nationalist path the industry would later take under the Nazis. Made in the Babelsberg studios, Murnau uses expressionistic imagery, surreal dream logic, and the deep structure of a psychological chamber play. Lubota's personal decline reflects the fragile attitude toward life in the Weimar Republic. The sets were designed by Hermann Warm and Erich Czerwonski, and Axel Graatkjaer was the cinematographer. The premiere took place on November 13, 1922, at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin—on the occasion of Hauptmann's 60th birthday.

The digitally restored version from 2014 secures the film's place in the canon of German Expressionism. Not a horror film like NOSFERATU, but a disturbingly clear drama about desire, madness, and lost control.