The Love Tragedy of the Homunculus
The Love Tragedy of the Homunculus
| 11 December 1916 (USA)
The Love Tragedy of the Homunculus Trailers

The homunculus and his companion Edgar Rodin make an invention that would allow the hateful homunculus to destroy the world. But first he wants to find out about love. When he observes how young Anna is rejected by her parents, he takes care of her and asks her parents for forgiveness - without success. He brings her to her seducer, who also rejects the girl. The homunculus then takes revenge by ruining the man financially and throwing Anna at his feet. But she still loves the villain and asks Homunculus for mercy. The homunculus cannot understand this feeling of love - he wants to try it out on himself. He puts a young woman who loves him to the hardest test, but she will do anything for him, sacrificing her fiancé and her parents. Only when he reveals his artificial nature to her, she leaves him. This experience confirms the homunculus in his intention to destroy mankind.

Reviews
2freensel I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.
Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.
Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.
boblipton This was originally a super-serial, composed of feature-length episodes, and like Feuillade's LES VAMPIRES, was meant to play not only as a serial, but as a series. However, the only remaining copy of this is a cut-down of all six episodes, about an hour and a quarter in length, held by the George Eastman House and available at the moment for viewing on their website. My thanks to them for making this and several dozen other movies of the Teens and early Twenties more generally available.While the are some great technical strengths to the movie, including some wonderful photography (notice the strong use of framing not by irising, as was still very common at this time, but by using structure and set decoration to change the effective frame size) and toning (a process in which the black silver nitrate is replaced by other compounds with colors, resulting in white whites, black blacks but colors instead of grays) and a good story which asks the question: is the soul born with the body, or the gift of god? Unfortunately, I find the style of acting to be rather over the top, involving a lot of rolling eyes. The net effect is very watchable, but not great.