Amazon.com Essentials:
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
