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a literal serial killer of babies is given a gloss of pathos as she justifies herself in speech with the gist that society was the real criminal all along. Really makes you think! Then we get an utterly syrupy happy ending with a shot of a child smiling serenely as she's adopted from an orphanage, all of the horrors somehow forgotten.

and not to defend the actions of the murderer at all, but is the society in which she lived not responsible for her actions? Europe during the Industrial Revolution was a place that most of its constituent elites and intellectuals understood in basic Malthusian terms, where poor or socially “unnecessary” people were to them an amorphous and dehumanized source of labor. Many of these social betters rationalized or welcomed the deaths of poor people due to disease, starvation, etc. as a natural check on overpopulation. This combined with religious-conservative attitudes towards the legitimacy and proper rearing of children according to their appointed station leads to some truly perverse social incentives in favor of making inconvenient people disappear. The killer is employed in that exact trade: for a price, she makes babies who burden their families for whatever reason (illegitimacy, too many children, birth defects, rape, etc.) vanish. Now, the film does a bad job of communicating this, particularly in the murderer’s final scene, where the director is trying way too hard to force parallels to Fritz Lang’s M, but when she identifies herself as providing a service that her society needs, she isn’t wrong. I suspect that the voting members of the Academy gave this film their assent because of its political connections to abortion. Not because child-killing and abortion are the same (they are vastly different as fetuses aren’t alive), but because a world without abortion and with stricter social control over women (in other words, the world that reactionaries want) looks very similar to the milieu of the film.

In a film where babies get strangled, I hated most how this scene uses the reveal of Peter's mangled face (deliberately hidden in previous scenes with the character) to make the viewer into a consumer of a kind of freak entertainment. It is already ridiculous to stage Peter and Karoline's reunion here, but the presentation of Peter's deformities in this scene works against the empathic connection actually being depicted in the scene. I admittedly don't like how the character was portrayed earlier in the film, with his panic attacks used as yet another domestic setpiece, but I found this scene in particular to be yet another tired example of a film using a disabled character as a prop while espousing empathy towards them, and I would actually mind it less if the film did not present the pretenses of that empathy towards this character.

As for the accusation that the film exploits Peter's appearance for shock, at the time it had been pointed out that The Elephant Man plays like a classic horror film for its first act, including the reveal of its title character. Von Horn must have been aware of this, as he proceeds differently. The revelation is delayed because Peter is ashamed of his appearance, when Karoline demands of him to remove his mask, this could have been an opportunity for a shock reveal. When he finally removes his mask on his own terms, it is a gradual process, and from then on the film takes a matter-of-fact approach to his face, never lingering on it. Later, he shows his face to a baby he is holding, knowing it has no preconceptions and won't look at him in shock or revulsion.

Accusing this of looking like a Saint Laurent ad just because its B&W is a cheap shot, the cinematography does an extraordinary job of recreating the look of contemporary photography, especially in the street scenes.

In court, the killer defends her actions by blaming society and (as MichaelB states) the limited to non-existent agency of women at the time, but she's not entirely wrong that this society has to take part of the blame. But I don't see why her desperate attempt at saving herself from the gallows should be held against the film, she looks crazed as she justifies her crimes. I saw a bit of Fritz Lang's M in the court scene, which also must have served as a visual reference. BTW, the real serial killer the film was inspired by based her defense around the claim that she was abused as a baby, which would have been far worse if kept for the film.

More importantly, that's not how the film ends. Given the accusations of "miserablism", it comes as a surprise that the film ends on a hopeful note, which, if the film is as miserable or nihilistic as suggested, is not the obvious way to end this.

In terms of the limited opportunities available to women in the early 20th century, this also struck me as a working-class counterpart to The House of Mirth, which showed that even socialites had little agency other than to inherit wealth or marry well. Without resorting to anachronistic attempts at a feminist statement, Karoline, for all her bad luck, never comes across as a passive victim. She is quite resilient, to the extent that she sometimes seems unsympathetic, and Vic Carmen Sonne's performance never pleads for our sympathy.