A Cottage on Dartmoor is a celebration of the mobility and compositional integrity of silent cinema that was originally conceived as a part-talkie. Director Anthony Asquith would become famous for his conventional adaptations of plays by George Bernard Shaw and Terence Rattigan, but A Cottage on Dartmoor is a forcefully visual film, with location footage that is as striking as the carefully framed interiors. Strongly influenced by both German Expressionism and Soviet montage, the complex flashback structure interweaves multiple points-of-view as it converges towards the present.