#82 ‘Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans’ (1927)

Swamps, Sin, and the Emotional Labor of Forgiving a Murder Plot

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is F.W. Murnau’s silent-era masterpiece, a visual poem about love, guilt, redemption—and a man who almost murders his wife but gets forgiven after buying her lunch and taking her on a boat ride. Hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, Sunrise is luminous, expressionistic, and emotionally operatic. It’s also a cautionary tale about why “he said he was sorry” should not be a complete character arc.

The story begins in a swamp—symbolic, subtle—where a nameless Man (George O’Brien) is lured by a sultry, black-clad vamp from the City who encourages him to murder his wife, the nameless Wife (Janet Gaynor), so they can run off together. His plan? Drown her in a boat. Subtlety was not the silent era’s strong suit.

But once he rows her out and she realizes what’s happening, she looks at him with such pure terror that he… doesn’t do it. Progress! He breaks down sobbing, and because this is a morality fable wrapped in visual ecstasy, the Wife begins the long, arduous process of emotionally rehabilitating her would-be murderer with a day of wholesome rural tourism. They go to a fair. They get their photo taken. They watch pigs race. He wins her back with remorse and cake.

Let’s be clear: Sunrise is breathtaking. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss’s cinematography is visionary, all drifting mists, looming shadows, and double exposures that make desire look like damnation. Murnau’s camera floats like memory, dreams, and guilt all braided together. Every frame is composed like a cathedral window.

But for all its artistry, the story hinges on the Wife’s capacity to forgive—a forgiveness that is neither earned nor truly interrogated. She’s not a woman; she’s an archetype: the eternal feminine, endlessly pure, endlessly forgiving, endlessly absorbent of male violence and regret. She is the reward for his remorse. Her trauma becomes a footnote to his emotional breakthrough.

The City Woman, on the other hand, is all sin and sequins—a walking moral panic with a garter belt. She’s the seductress archetype with no backstory, just lipstick and a plan. She exists to corrupt the man, disappear in a storm, and let the Wife’s halo shine even brighter. Sunrise doesn’t just reduce women to symbols—it puts them on opposing ends of the Madonna/Whore seesaw and cuts the rope.

And yet, despite its regressive morality, Sunrise remains hypnotic. The emotions are grand, the stakes primal, and the visuals transcendent. It’s cinema at its most poetic, even when the message reads like a purity ring manual wrapped in roses.

4 out of 5 double exposures
(One for the direction. One for the cinematography. One for Gaynor’s luminous suffering. One for proving silent film could speak volumes. The missing star? Drowned somewhere in that foggy swamp, along with the idea that maybe women deserve more than to be plot devices in men’s journeys to moral clarity.)