In this haunting film, a mentally ill young woman and three of her family members - younger brother, older husband, and aging father - vacation on an idyllic island. While at first her schizophrenia seems to be in remission, family pressures trigger a rapid decline. To the grief of the rest of the family, her future prospects are dim and she, as the person they knew, may be leaving their lives forever. In the end, we are only left with a small glimmer of hope, that even though life seems cruel and unfair, the ability of people to care about each other provides an intimation that somehow things are not hopeless.
Rather than a realistic picture of clinical schizophrenia, the film primarily uses her condition to explore how people struggle with the contrast between the "magic circle" of living an outwardly normal, successful life, with the realities and forces operating apparently from the outside that threaten to destroy their tranquility. The illness of the sister represents one possibility in a life where existentially people find themselves continually in deep water, where their constructs of life are constantly threatened. Each of the family members seems poised between their social construct as a happy, nice family member, and their interior and exterior threats.
The father is an aging isolated man who poses as a serious writer tackling serious questions such as the existence of God, but who is suicidally depressed by the knowledge that his writing is pop fluff of no real significance, and that his real preoccupation is not universal issues but his personal failure as father and a husband. The son is young and naive, still living the regulated life of a student, but deeply frustrated in his desires for intimacy with women and recognition from his father. Karin, the daughter, is doll-like and cheerful on the surface, but haunted by the depressing undersurface of life, which is expressed by trenchant observations at first but then increasingly by nightmare hallucinations of wolves, owls, spiders, and voices in her head. She is sexually repelled by and emotionally distant from her older husband and prefers the company of her impressionable younger brother.
Max von Sydow, playing the husband, is the most sympathetic and normal member of the quartet, as the supportive husband. He is a stolid, kind, somewhat pompous physician who stays easily on keel with positive and normal thoughts and actions, unlike Karin and the rest of her hyper-sensitive family. However, it is implied that this feat is accomplished through lack of imagination and stubborn refusal to notice whatever isn't "fit to be noticed". The harder he tries to pull Karin back from her visionary fantasies, the more she is repulsed by what she sees as his stupidity.
Marring the film are some heavy-handed and overly theatrical moments. For example, where the father, played by Gunnar Bjornstrand, pontificates heavily to the point where suspension of disbelief is stretched, or where the Bach soundtrack comes in to underscore somewhat tediously that a moment is "profound". Related to this, the father plays a self-loathing artist who it is not hard to see as Bergman engaging in self-critique that is overly egocentric, not of general interest.
Flaws aside, this is a beautiful movie, that manages to make the most miserable family vacation ever a fascinating experience.
Rather than a realistic picture of clinical schizophrenia, the film primarily uses her condition to explore how people struggle with the contrast between the "magic circle" of living an outwardly normal, successful life, with the realities and forces operating apparently from the outside that threaten to destroy their tranquility. The illness of the sister represents one possibility in a life where existentially people find themselves continually in deep water, where their constructs of life are constantly threatened. Each of the family members seems poised between their social construct as a happy, nice family member, and their interior and exterior threats.
The father is an aging isolated man who poses as a serious writer tackling serious questions such as the existence of God, but who is suicidally depressed by the knowledge that his writing is pop fluff of no real significance, and that his real preoccupation is not universal issues but his personal failure as father and a husband. The son is young and naive, still living the regulated life of a student, but deeply frustrated in his desires for intimacy with women and recognition from his father. Karin, the daughter, is doll-like and cheerful on the surface, but haunted by the depressing undersurface of life, which is expressed by trenchant observations at first but then increasingly by nightmare hallucinations of wolves, owls, spiders, and voices in her head. She is sexually repelled by and emotionally distant from her older husband and prefers the company of her impressionable younger brother.
Max von Sydow, playing the husband, is the most sympathetic and normal member of the quartet, as the supportive husband. He is a stolid, kind, somewhat pompous physician who stays easily on keel with positive and normal thoughts and actions, unlike Karin and the rest of her hyper-sensitive family. However, it is implied that this feat is accomplished through lack of imagination and stubborn refusal to notice whatever isn't "fit to be noticed". The harder he tries to pull Karin back from her visionary fantasies, the more she is repulsed by what she sees as his stupidity.
Marring the film are some heavy-handed and overly theatrical moments. For example, where the father, played by Gunnar Bjornstrand, pontificates heavily to the point where suspension of disbelief is stretched, or where the Bach soundtrack comes in to underscore somewhat tediously that a moment is "profound". Related to this, the father plays a self-loathing artist who it is not hard to see as Bergman engaging in self-critique that is overly egocentric, not of general interest.
Flaws aside, this is a beautiful movie, that manages to make the most miserable family vacation ever a fascinating experience.