 According to critic Martha P. Nochimson , the film is an exploration of the place of anonymous breakdowns of social order in personal life . For the most part , questions of justice operate in the background of The Man From London , which foregrounds the perceptions and point of view of an accidental witness to the murder , who , like the viewer , has no connection with anyone involved . The film principally concerns the texture of the world of the protagonist Maloin as he experiences it ﬁrst hand : fog , light , shadow , skin , walls , ﬂoors , windows , sounds . These are much closer to Maloin than any broken laws involving strangers as in the killing at the dock . As distinct from the trope of crime functioning as a break from the boredom of the mundane for the Hitchcockian ordinary man " excitingly " caught up in it , the interjection of crime in the lives of the characters of The Man from London is a phantom occurrence for those burrowed into the center of the mundane details of their lives . In other words , Tarr 's ﬁlm suggests the possibility that it is only on an abstract plane that murder committed by and on strangers causes a stir and demands an investigation . In this context , it is fitting that the investigation must be undertaken by a stranger , the man from London , since abstraction entails distancing from an enveloping context . Only the appearance of the man from London , Brown , impels Maloin to struggle with his de facto alienation , as an ordinary man , from moral principle , an alienation linked , counterintuitively , to the absence of desire in his daily grind . 
