There are 20 prints of the film in different film archives. As a matter of fact, all of them were originated by three different incomplete matrices. The recent discovery of the colour version (5 tintings) in the Cineteca Italiana di Milano has permitted the renewal of the restoration project, which was undertaken by Fondazione Cineteca Italiana Milano, Cineteca del Comune di Bologna and Filmmuseum Stadtmuseum München, which will continue by comparing and collating all the existing materials of the film.

"Of the four extant versions of this perennial horror classic, Paul Wegener's 1920 version remains the best. Wegener both directs and stars in this extraordinarily vivid, magical, brooding film. His hulking claylike monster is an archetype, and the astonishing, angular, teetering sets by Hans Poelzig are an example of the nightmare world of the occult made breathtakingly concrete."
— Don Druker, Chicago Reader

"The oddest thing about The Golem (whose subtitle, "How He Came Into the World" distinguishes itself from several other Golem films, a couple of which were also directed by Wegener) is how much it relies on suggestion for effect. For all its lavish production values, it shows us very little in terms of its story's darker turns. ... As danger may lurk in the shadows of the frame, so too does it lurk in the dark possibilities of the tale. The Golem is not so much a horror film as a suggestive piece of fantasy. The film exists in a world where powerful rabbis conjure up spells and see visions of the future, where figures from the past directly alter events in the present. ... In fact, it might be rewarding to see the film as an intriguing counterpoint to F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu ..., where the physically frail, though certainly gruesome, vampire has powers that can transcend space, can cause madness and disease. The Golem, physically imposing as he is, is just a large, unthinking brute, at the mercy of those around him, even small children. The whisper-thin vampire and the burly automaton are in a sense the two great monsters of 1920s German cinema.
— Bilge Ebiri, The Film Journal No. 4 / 2002

"Paul Wegener had too strong a personality to be content with merely imitating [Max] Reinhardt's style. His treatment of the magical lighting-effects found at the Deutsches Theater was to adapt them to the needs of the cinema. From his previous work in natural settings he kept a fluidity of atmosphere which he managed to bring to his studio-made Golem. An airy lightness hangs about the shots of the flower-garlanded children playing in front of the ghetto gates. Wegener uses every one of [Max] Reinhardt's lighting-effects: the stars glinting against a velvety sky, the fierty glow of the alchemist's furnace, the little oil-lamp lighting a corner of the darkened room when Miriam appears, the servant holding a lantern, the row of blazing torches flickering in the night, and, in he synagogue, the light trembling over the prostate, indistinct forms wrapped in cloaks, with the sacred, haloed seven-branched candelabra emerging from the darkness."
— Lotte H. Eisner: The Haunted Screen. Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Berkeley-Los Ageles-London 1994, p. 56

"Wegener was a cinematic visionary who strived to enhance his films with inventive camerawork. 'The real creator of the film must be the camera. Getting the spectator to change his point of view, using special effects to double the actor on the divided screen, superimposing other images — all this, technique, form, gives the content its real meaning,' he said in a 1916 lecture. 'Everything depends on the image, on a certain vagueness of outline where the fantastic world of the past meets the world of today. I realized that photographic technique was going to determine the destiny of the cinema. Light and darkness in the cinema play the same role as rhythm and cadence in music.'
Carl Boese, who is sometimes credited as co-director with Wegener, was really more of an assistant director. 'Wegener always preferred to have a craftsman at his side,' Boese explained. Boese was primarily responsible for finding a way to execute the ambitious visual effects Wegener conceived for the film, such as the floating, smoke-breathing head of Astaroth and dancing flames in the 'creation' sequence (which involved complex double exposure, copper wires, burning nitrocellulose and tanks of carbon dioxide)."
— Bret Wood, Turner Classic Movies