The Silence

The Silence (1963) closes Ingmar Bergman's loose trilogy on faith. It is the most enigmatic of the three films and, in its day, the most scandalous. Its companions wrestled openly with God; this one is set in a world from which the divine has simply withdrawn, leaving only the body, the will and a failure to communicate.

Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom play the two estranged sisters, stranded in a hotel in an unnamed, possibly war-bound country whose language they cannot understand. Lindblom's young son wanders the corridors while the women's mutual hostility and the elder sister's illness deepen around him. Bergman and Sven Nykvist film the airless rooms and empty streets with a hushed, hypnotic precision, and the sexuality, explicit for its time, caused uproar and censorship battles across the world.

For all the controversy, The Silence proved to be one of Bergman's most influential films. Its alienation and its bold treatment of desire echo through European art cinema, and film-makers from David Lynch onward have openly admired the sense of estrangement created by its airless hotel and untranslatable foreign city. It is a study of incommunicability and of the void that is left when belief departs, and it remains mysterious and troubling, a trilogy closer that declines to offer answers. That refusal, together with its frankness about desire and its mood of cosmic estrangement, has kept it among the most studied and debated of all Bergman's films.