Through a Glass Darkly (Svensk Filmindustri; Janus) is one of the best and certainly the ripest of Ingmar Bergman's creations, a film as subtle as Wild Strawberries but solider in substance—the first film in which Bergman creates a hero who can love and characters for whom the spectator cannot help but care. "The other pictures I have made," says Bergman, "have been only études. This is Opus I."
Bergman's Opus I is constructed conscientiously as a quartet, a thematic analysis of four lives. The lives are those of a well-known novelist (Gunnar Bjornstrand), his 17-year-old son (Lars Passgard), his married daughter (Harriet Andersson) and her doctor husband (Max von Sydow), all on vacation on an isolated Baltic island. The daughter, who has recently been electroshocked out of schizophrenia, is trying to face the difficult facts of her life: a devoted husband whom she does not love, a selfish father whose love she needs but cannot have, an ego that stands fascinated, like a rabbit, before the great snake of the unconscious.
As the young woman watches her father sacrifice his son's happiness to his artistic ambitions, as once he sacrificed hers, she is plunged into depression—the snake swallows her up. She hears voices that force her to give the lonely, unhappy boy the love his father refuses. She also gives him the lust she cannot give her husband. When the seizure passes, she sees that the experience has almost destroyed her brother; appalled by the power of darkness in her life, she longs for salvation. Voices lure her into "another world," promising that there she will see God. All at once, in her mind's delirious eye, she does see God. He is an enormous spider. She is carried off to a madhouse.
Horror cracks the armor of unfeeling that encloses the father's heart. In accepting his guilt for his daughter's destruction, he finds his humanity. He turns to his suffering son and comforts him. Out of the depths, in wonder and gratitude, the boy cries as the film ends: "Father talked to me!"
The moment—in fact the whole film—is charged with a simple, sincere feeling that has seldom before been noticeable in Bergman's movies. Bergman's new capacity to touch the heart is not a large capacity, not a teeming oceanic love of all mankind. But it is enough to melt the ice in his irony and to lend his humor a kindly glow. It also pumps some warm blood into his characters, and the warmth has relaxed and inspired his actors: seldom has one film offered four performances of comparable quality.
At every point, moreover, the actors are supported by Bergman's impressive cinematic skill. His script is a marvel of elision, speaking most eloquently in what it does not say. His photography is both poetic and worshipful. In every frame of the film the still light of subarctic summer silently instills an aspect of eternity, a sense of the presence of God. But as always, Bergman's interest centers in his metaphysical insights. In Through a Glass Darkly he proposes one of the most dreadful and most significant symbols he has ever imagined: the Spider God. Many moviegoers will find this deity depressing. But to Bergman it represents an abysmal Incarnation, the birth of a dark hope.