There’s a dullness at the heart of the movie, and the allegorical scheme leads to scenes that recall the conventions of silent films and the clichés of second-rate movie acting.

Bergman is simultaneously at his most brilliant and most brutal in this unforgiving 90-minute psychodrama...

This film burns, like ice held to the skin.

Rather than disrupting the bitterness spread across the film, these idyllic sequences feel laden with the same paranoia that plagues the other sisters. After all, a diary is the language one addresses to oneself.