A seaman hires on as a janitor at an insane asylum to free his wife, who's become an inmate after attempting to kill herself and her baby.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's review from the Chicago Reader: "Teinosuke Kinugasa's mind-boggling silent masterpiece of 1926 was thought to have been lost for 40 years until the director discovered a print in his garden shed. The film's expressionist style is all the more surprising because Japan had no such tradition to speak of; Kinugasa hadn't even seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari when he made this. Yet the rhythmic pulsation of graphic, semiabstract depictions of madness makes the film both startling and mesmerizing." [Taken from Arsenevich]