This surrealist interpretation of the character Fantômas, made famous by the popular novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre as well as the film series by Louis Feuillade, portrays the master criminal in an ironic and subversive way as a symbol of anarchy, deception and the subconscious. Director Ernst Moerman was one of the exponents of Belgian surrealism. His experimental film blends crime thriller elements with absurd humour and avant-garde techniques, transforming Fantômas into a surrealist icon in the process: mysterious, omnipresent and opposed to all forms of order.

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As with Buñuel’s films, MONSIEUR FANTÔMAS is very rich in terms of surrealist images […] But one image stands out from all the rest: the sequence in which Fantômas is surrounded by police. The contagious and enjoyable sense of humour running throughout the film suddenly comes to the surface. Given the surrealists well-known taste for slapstick humour, this is not surprising. As if in an old Mack Sennett or Ben Turpin film, the master criminal turns into a double bass to escape the police. Logic and reason are now gone, if ever they once ruled, and the time has come for pure fantasy and delirium. In fact, this penchant for farcical elements is one of the most remarkable qualities of the film. On many occasions, surrealists refer to the ‘immediate absurdity’ of their output, the peculiar quality of that absurdity being a yielding to whatever is most admissible and legitimate in the world: divulgation of a given number of facts and properties on the whole not less objectionable than others. Undoubtedly, MONSIEUR FANTÔMAS represents the quintessence of that particular taste for absurdity. – Moerman, evoking the screening of his film on October 12th, 1937 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, described the opening night as deeply marked by “silent film nostalgia”.
Santiago Rubín de Celi, Experimental Conversations, No. 7, Summer 2011