The Virgin Spring

Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and stands among the starkest of the director's many studies of faith and doubt. Based on a medieval Swedish ballad, it was photographed by Sven Nykvist, beginning the cinematographer's long and defining partnership with Bergman that would run through the rest of both careers.

Max von Sydow plays the devout, prosperous farmer whose ordered, believing world is shattered by an act of violence committed on a forest road. Bergman strips the period setting of all romance and pageantry, filming the landscape and its people with a hard, luminous simplicity, and confronts the question that runs through so much of his work: where is God when the innocent suffer, and what does faith demand of a man in the face of the unbearable? The performances are plain and weighty, the medieval world rendered as something harsh and close.

The film proved enormously influential — Wes Craven's notorious The Last House on the Left is a direct, brutal reworking of its premise — even as it remains a world apart from its imitators in gravity and restraint. Severe, beautiful and morally unflinching, it distils Bergman's central preoccupations into a single terrible narrative, and closes on an image of grace, welling up from the earth, that has lost none of its power to disquiet.