#the lodger

New-to-me movies seen in 2026: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

"God forgive me, I let her go out with the lodger!"

The Lodger

Silent era movie. It’s Hitchcock’s first surviving feature, his previous two films having been lost.

It tells the story of a serial killer, The Avenger, who has been murdering blond women around London. Daisy Bunting (Marie Ault) is a blond model and her parents run a lodging house. A mysterious handsome young man (Ivor Novello) takes up a room and his unusual demeanour creates suspicion. Daisy however, seems to find him charming, to the dismay of her police detective suitor Joe Chandler (Malcolm Keen). Assigned to the Avenger case, he starts to suspect the lodger.

It’s a great movie. I love how Hitchcock uses the black and white, which looks great despite the poor quality of the surviving print. Silent era actors have such a specific acting style. You can still see Hitchcock’s style, despite it being such a different way of making films than after the “talkies” became a thing. For silent era films, I have mostly seen German expressionist films: Metropolis, Nosferatu, and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and I had never thought about Hitchcock having been a contemporary. This movie came out the same year as Metropolis.

Really enjoyed that. I’ve bought the book this is based on: The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes. I’ll be reading that at some point.