The Silence

The concluding film of Ingmar Bergman's loose trilogy on faith, The Silence (1963) is the most enigmatic and, in its day, the most scandalous. Where its companions wrestled openly with God, this one stages a world from which the divine has simply withdrawn, leaving only the body, the will and a failure to communicate.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 its corridors as the women's mutual hostility and the elder's illness deepen. Bergman and Sven Nykvist render the airless rooms and empty streets with a hushed, hypnotic precision, and the film's then-explicit sexuality caused uproar and censorship battles across the world.

For all the controversy, The Silence proved one of Bergman's most influential films, its alienation and its bold treatment of desire echoing through European art cinema; David Lynch and others have acknowledged its spell. A study of incommunicability and the void left when belief departs, it remains a mysterious, troubling work — the trilogy's final word being, fittingly, an absence of answers. Its bold treatment of desire and its mood of cosmic estrangement have kept it among the most studied and debated of all Bergman's films. Its airless hotel and untranslatable foreign city create a sense of estrangement that film-makers from David Lynch onward have openly admired.