What’s most interesting about the film is its overall strategy.  The audience isn’t aware the movie is a delusion until it concludes.  This method is very vivid in that we experience the dystopia that is created in the mind of Francis as a reality only to find out it is a figment of his imagination.   This allows the audience to experience world of a madman first hand and what makes the film most disturbing. 

‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ is a forerunner in distorting the audience’s reality.  It begins in an ordinarily serene environment into a complex fresco of sensory experiences that haunts its viewers.  The German Expressionist method found in the film is successful in representing the psyche of the off kilter protagonist, Francis.  It is an excellent example of the movements preoccupations with the depiction of the fantastical and haunting terror of the time, but done quite acutely through the representation of a madman’s subconscious world. 

Having been one of the first real cinematic representations and attempts of this, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, sets up a framework where film can be used to manipulate the audiences perception.  It becomes a vehicle for exploring the human psyche. Since then modern film has used various strategies to manipulate the conventional reality of the audience in order to understand various attributes of the human psyche.