The Lady from Shanghai

Orson Welles’s hypnotic puzzle film set the standard for using literal and figurative labyrinths to mirror a society’s darkest truths. Hired as a crewman by a wealthy lawyer (Everett Sloane), Irish drifter Michael O’Hara (Welles) finds himself seduced and ensnared by the lawyer’s wife Elsa, played by a platinum-blonde Rita Hayworth in one of the genre’s most enigmatic femme fatale turns. Critics were baffled upon its release by the narrative contortions and dense plot, but the disorientation is the point; Welles fashions a baroque noir of fatalism and entrapment, where escape is an illusion and the self is a hall of mirrors. Its iconic, climactic mirror maze shootout has since been echoed in countless films (from Enter the Dragon to the climax of John Wick: Chapter 2); in Us, a seaside carnival’s funhouse of mirrors marks the inciting location of horror and revelation. Print courtesy of the Yale Film Archive.