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. It was made by Wes Craven in ‘72 and Dennis Iliadis in 2009 as horror. But Bergman’s version is less interested in violence than in how that violence reflects, confounds, or challenges the faith of its characters. It’s not about the crime. It’s about the guilt.

Töre (Max von Sydow) and Märeta (Birgitta Valberg) are farmers in Medieval Sweden. Their daughter Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) is mischievous but innocent. She must deliver candles to the church as an offering for Easter, a task that must be performed by a virgin. Her parents are devoutly Christian; their first appearance is a scene that shows them praying to a crucifix. Another scene soon after shows them sharing a meal with servants in a tableau that echoes Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

They have taken in another girl, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), who is pregnant out of wedlock and prays to the pagan god Odin. She is looked down upon by the parents and servants alike and is bitterly jealous of Karin. We are not told how she has come to be pregnant, but there are details that suggest she might have been raped. She warns Karin that she may come across a man who will take her by force and spoil her innocence; perhaps she is being cruel to a girl who is favored for her purity, or perhaps she speaks from experience.

Ingeri’s prediction comes true. After being separated on their way to the church, she watches as Karin shows kindness to three goatherds. Two of the goatherds then rape her, beat her to death, and steal her garments. The murder scene, which drew controversy and came under the scrutiny of Sweden’s censorship board, is disturbing but matter-of-fact, not exploitive. Bergman’s camera remains mostly static, cutting between medium shots and closeups that do not show gory details but rather a violent tangle of bodies. He uses sound sparingly, and there is no underscore to speak of. There are no exertions of style.

Bergman’s approach is objective and visually understated but produces powerful scenes: Märeta cradling a familiar garment that confirms her fears; Töre felling a birch tree with his brute strength, as if raging against God and nature for the destruction of his child; a mortal struggle framed by flames that evoke hellfire. My favorite scene is between a beggar (Allan Edwall) and a boy (Ove Porath), the youngest of the three goatherds, who fearfully watched his older brothers assault Karin. The beggar tells the boy, who lays Christlike in a straw bed, a fable about the fearsome power of hell and the promised redemption of heaven. The beggar seems to know the boy’s secret somehow, and the boy achieves a kind of reconciliation through his tale.

Redemption is a pivotal theme. A Christian self-guilt pervades the characters to such an extent that the only ones who don’t feel responsible for Karin’s death are the two who killed her. Töre begs to be forgiven for his rage even as he wails at God for allowing such violence. Märeta believes she is being punished for her jealousy of her husband, whom Karin seemed to favor. Ingeri wished Karin harm and believes she willed it to happen. The boy watched the crime and is threatened by his brothers into silence. As they internalize the event, it creates a breach in their relationships with God, and Bergman in turn questions the place of God in a world where such violence exists, where Christian ideals butt against lingering pagan worship and godless, arbitrary destruction.

The Lord works in mysterious ways, the saying goes. If so, can you accept this way? There comes a seemingly miraculous event. It does not confirm the existence of God, per se, but rather provides a means of absolution, of spiritual release from that which does not seem to be part of the natural order. There’s a feeling of forgiveness in it.

A segment from the film: