Sven Nykvist's luminous black-and-white photography conspiring with the austerity of Bergman's imagery to create an extraordinary metaphysical charge.

Represents the primary nexus between Bergman's austere but accessibly recherché works of the 1950s and his downright ascetic 1960s cinema.

It is far from an easy picture to watch or entirely commend. For Mr. Bergman has stocked it with scenes of brutality that, for sheer unrestrained realism, may leave one sickened and stunned.

With [this film], Ingmar Bergman has moved without further hesitation into the deep crucial places of tragic art, into the abiding forest which surrounds our daytime and gives the lie to our belief that all contingent evils can be socialized away.