Ingmar Bergman-Såsom i en spegel ('Through a Glass Darkly') (1961)

While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family’s already fragile ties are tested when daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) discovers her father has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary means. As she drifts in and out of lucidity, the father (Gunnar Björnstrand), along with Karin’s husband (Max von Sydow) and her younger brother (Lars Passgård) are unable to prevent Karin’s harrowing descent into the abyss of mental illness. Winner of the 1962 Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film and featuring an astonishing lead performance by Andersson, Through a Glass Darkly presents an unflinching vision of a family’s near-disintegration and a tortured psyche further taunted by God’s intangible presence. Criterion




On an island, Karin, a recently released mentally sick young woman, is spending her vacation with her husband Martin, a doctor, her father David, a writer just back from Switzerland, and her younger brother Fredrick (Minus). Karin is suffering from hallucinations and hysteria. She thinks she is visited by God. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0055499/plotsummary)




Through a Glass Darkly concerns a psychologically fragile woman, Karin (Harriet Andersson), who seeks recovery from a nervous breakdown while on a remote-island vacation with her family. Unfortunately, her father (Gunnar Björnstrand), a successful writer, regards her with clinical detachment, her husband (Max Von Sydow), a doctor, feels unavailing in the effort to treat her, and her brother (Lars Passgard) is wrapped up in his own quest for sexual fulfillment.




Karin's descent into further loneliness and delusion exacerbates the heretofore unspoken alienation at the heart of this entire family, and drives the characters to brood over the existence of God (or, in Karin's case, imagine that God is the chilling spider hidden behind an attic door). Through a Glass Darkly is a heartbreaking, powerful work of art. (–Tom Keogh - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




Ingmar Bergman's gloomy but incisive 1961 classic about a woman's descent into madness–and the inability of her family to mitigate her pain with love–is still a stunning work. Harriet Andersson plays Karin, a psychiatric patient newly released from a hospital and staying in the island home where she found some measure of security in childhood. Instead of getting on her feet, however, Karin begins disintegrating after realizing she no longer loves her physician husband (Max von Sydow) and is being rather coldly observed by her writer father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), whose distant fascination with her plight is recorded in his daily journal.




Hearing voices, believing God to be a spider, and pursuing an incestuous relationship with her brother, Karin slips into an inexorable decline, objectively witnessed by those too emotionally frozen to help. The first of Bergman's trilogy on themes of faith and isolation (the other entries being Winter Light and The Silence), Through a Glass Darkly finds the legendary Swedish filmmaker at an artistic and philosophical peak. (–Tom Keogh - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)




At the beginning of the 1960s, renowned film director Ingmar Bergman began work on what were to become some of his most powerful and representative works—the Trilogy. Already a figure of tremendous international acclaim for such masterworks as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, Bergman turned his back on the abundant symbolism and exotic imagery of his ‘50s work to focus on a series of impacted, emotionally explosive chamber dramas examining faith and alienation in the modern age. Utilizing a new cameraman—the incomparable Sven Nykvist—Bergman unleashed Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence in rapid succession, exposing moviegoers worldwide to a new level of intellectual and emotional intensity.




Each film employs minimal dialogue, eerily isolated settings, and searing performances from such Bergman regulars as Max von Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom in their evocation of a desperate world confronted with God’s desertion. Drawing on Bergman’s own severely religious upbringing and ensuing spiritual crisis, the films in the Trilogy are deeply personal, challenging, and enriching works that exhibit the filmmaker’s peerless formal mastery and fierce intelligence. (amazon.com)