A Daughter of Destiny

An unscrupulous doctor (Paul Wegener) creates a living 'mandrake', the soulless offspring of a prostitute inseminated with the semen taken from an executed criminal. The unnatural progeny, Alraune (German for mandrake), is played by temptress extraordinaire Brigitte Helm, best known for playing the saintly Maria and her evil Maschinenmensch avatar in Fritz Lang's 'Metropolis' (1927). Although the film is sometimes classified as horror/science fiction, it is more of a romantic melodrama, as the doctor slowly becomes infatuated with his creation, who is beginning to aspire to human feelings. Human artificial insemination had been around since the late 1700s, so other than the choice of sperm donor, there is nothing particularly novel about the premise, which is essentially a test of the frequently overly-simplified 'nature/nurture' dichotomy (in reality, it is nature 'plus' nurture, not nature 'or' nurture). The eponymous 1911 novel by Hanns Heinz Ewers had been films twice before this version and several times afterwards but the 1928 silent is considered to be truest to the original story. The film has not aged well - not a lot happens and the silent acting comes off as a bit theatrical. There are several versions on-line, with and without music. The image quality in the one I watched was not great but the score, a mix of recognisable 'classics', helped pass the time spent watching the relatively boring film.