Genuine is the second expressionist film by the director Robert Wiene, produced right after the success of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in the same year, 1920. It stars Fern Andra as a blood-sucking slave girl and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski as a stripling who falls for her, another hapless young man with a terrible fate.

The male subject in crisis, a key motif of Weimar cinema that Wiene had already explored in Caligari, is deployed again in Genuine as plot-developing element—but now with a renewed emphasis on the female counterpart. While Caligari's Jane (Lil Dagover), though the main focus of the male protagonists’ desires, was a passive “damsel in distress,” Andra's Genuine is one of those dangerous femmes fatales who filled Weimar cinema screens in the decade to follow. Being a victim of cruel sect rituals, Genuine has lost all ability to feel empathy or mercy. She uses her talent for manipulation and seduction to escape slavery—and to take bloody revenge on all men for what has been done to her.

Even though Genuine was not a commercial success, it is still a valuable subject for research since it touches on dramatic social changes in postwar Weimar society, especially the erosion of traditional male and female roles. By undermining the male character as a weak, powerless and disoriented figure who is helpless in the face of a wicked woman's alluring sexuality, the film presents to us a distinctive narrative scenario in which the danger does not primarily come from a male rival but from an empowered, dangerous woman who pulls all the strings.

An innocent girl in the clutches of a mysterious sect that forces her to participate in its bloody rituals before she escapes, ending up in the arms of slave traders who then resell her to an eccentric lord living in a secluded, closely-guarded house where she is again held captive—when Genuine, the lead protagonist of Robert Wiene's film of the same title, is first introduced to viewers, she is displayed as a victim, helpless in the hands of her male masters, abused and exploited.