Diary of a Lost Girl

G.W. Pabst's searing companion piece to Pandora's Box, again starring Louise Brooks in a performance of extraordinary emotional transparency. Brooks plays Thymian, a pharmacist's daughter whose life is systematically destroyed by the hypocrisies of respectable society: seduced and abandoned, packed off to a brutal reform school, and eventually cast into prostitution. Where another director might have made misery melodrama, Pabst crafts something more quietly devastating — a precise, almost anthropological study of how institutions meant to protect women actually consume them. Brooks brings to Thymian the same luminous, modern presence she gave Lulu, but here tempered with a vulnerability that makes every scene ache. A film of controlled fury that loses none of its power.