The Virgin Spring

Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and is 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, the start of a long and defining partnership between cinematographer and director that would run through the rest of both their 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 and films the landscape and its people with a hard, luminous simplicity. He comes back to 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, and the medieval world feels harsh and close.

Its influence was enormous. Wes Craven's notorious The Last House on the Left is a direct, brutal reworking of its premise, yet Bergman's film remains a world apart from its imitators in gravity and restraint. It is severe and beautiful, and it distils Bergman's central preoccupations into a single terrible narrative told without moral evasion, in images that have lost none of their power to disquiet.