Perhaps because I know Sweden mostly as the home of Ingmar Bergman and Let the Right One In, I was expecting something different from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It shapes up as an old-fashioned Agatha Christie-style mystery about two dogged, mismatched detectives going through a cold case to uncover hidden family secrets and [...]

“Al fin de la batalla,
y muerto el combatiente, vino hacia él un hombre
y le dijo: ‘No mueras, te amo tanto!’
Pero el cadáver ¡ay! siguió muriendo.”
“La Masa”, César Vallejo, 1937
A man enters a room while another man lies inside a tanning bed. They have an exchange about how their company is downsizing and the troubles it [...]

The silence of God has never been more strident than in Cries and Whispers, Ingmar Bergman’s 1972 masterpiece. In fact it is so loud that it keeps the inhabitants of an old manor awake all the time. They are four women; Agnes (Harriet Andersson) who is dying of womb cancer, her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) [...]

Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 drama The Virgin Spring, whose story is retold in the contemporary 1972 horror film The Last House on the Left and its recent remake, is based on a 13th Century Swedish ballad that can be summarized in a sentence: a young girl is brutally raped and murdered, and the killers unwittingly seek refuge with her parents. I suppose because its setup is so simple it is ideal to be remade and reinterpreted; a filmmaker can make of it what he will. Bergman’s version is less interested in violence than in how…

I’ve seen a lot of films about marriage, but Scenes from a Marriage may be the best. Written and directed by the late Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, the 1973 drama is filmed on sets less sophisticated than most sitcoms, with camerawork equally simple, but in its writing and acting it is more passionate, more scorching, and more intimate than any film of its kind I can think of. It presents the dissolution of a marriage as only the beginning of a love story built on pain, lust, cruelty, anger, and affection…

Sweden’s much-acclaimed, much-talked-about and much-shockingly-left-out-of-the-Best-Foreign-Film-Oscar-nominations – ‘Let The Right One In’ – has been genrefied as a “horror”. It has also been called a “vampire film”. But while it has its bloodcurdling and bloodsucking moments – all the more chilling because they creep up on you like a black cat at midnight – it is really neither of those things. What it is, is a story about two creatures of the dark – the dark being not the obvious kind that has things going bump in it…

Summer interlude is a story of longing and unrequited love starring Maj Britt Nilsson. Directed by Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman

Director: Ingmar Bergman
According to the Vatican Best Film List, this movie is a portrayal of a man’s “interior journey from the pangs of regret and anxiety to a refreshing sense of peace and reconciliation.” As professor Isak Borg drives from Stockholm, to Lund, to receive an honorary degree conferred by Lund University, he promenades down [...]