Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
The film is about an unemployed banker, Henri Verdoux, and his sociopathic methods of attaining income. While being both loyal and competent in his work, Verdoux has been laid-off. To make money for his wife and child, he marries wealthy widows and then murders them. His crime spree eventually works against him when two particular widows break his normal routine.
Chaplin's darkest and most intellectually daring film, Monsieur Verdoux is a genuine outlier in cinema history — a black comedy about a serial killer that doubles as a savage indictment of capitalism and warfare. The plot is sharp, morally provocative, and constructed with Chaplin's characteristic precision, while his performance as Verdoux is among his finest, trading sentiment for ice-cold wit and philosophical menace. The novelty is exceptional: no other film of the era attempts such pointed social satire wrapped in a villain-protagonist romantic comedy framework. Cinematography is competent but unremarkable for the period — functional noir-inflected studio work without particular visual ambition. The ending, where Verdoux meets the guillotine and delivers his famous indictment of society, is memorable and thematically resonant but feels slightly schematic in its speechifying, preventing it from achieving full dramatic impact.