Barbed with copious symbolism and crowded with "prisoners" on a life sentence, Prison (1948) is a grim reminder of Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman's astonishing early fluency with both his actors and his despair. Up for debate is the near-certainty that "life stretches in a cruel but voluptuous arc from birth to death, a meaningless journey," a theme that Prison on the one hand supports with the example of a defeated girl's knife-pierced suicide for a film.

The gloomy grandeur of Bergman's nihilism is here at its most poisonous, and although the seemingly irreparable marriage at its centre shows signs of recovery by the story's end (only to be resolved with another bottle shattered over the head by the same duellists one film later), there is little else to counterbalance the infanticide, the sadism and the torture to suggest a spark of optimism concerning human nature. The Devil seemingly rules the world, churches his allies, God his own intervention, with nothing on offer resembling sanctuary.

Surprisingly, Prison was written during an autumn holiday when domestic harmony coincided with a favourable public response to both his theatre and his film productions. It was one of the few times in Bergman's career when everything was going right. Even so, he recognized that Prison made new demands on the patience and resources of his friends and sponsors Lorens Marmstedt, the independent producer of his first films, and accepted a vestigial budget and a change of title (Bergman wrote it as "True Story"). At Marmstedt's insistence, Bergman recalls, "we had to save on absolutely everything. We managed to borrow one set for free from another movie. We kept using three walls that had their wallpaper changed over and over. Doors and windows swapped places."

In a satirical piece for the local paper, Bergman described how to make "the cheapest film that has ever been made in a Swedish studio," and set out some basics: cut down the number of shooting days. Limit the building sets. No extras. No music (or only sparingly used). Ban overtime. Limit use of raw stock. Exterior shots should be filmed without sound or lighting. Conduct all rehearsals outside of the actual shooting time. Begin early in the morning. See to it that the shooting of excessive material is stopped. Trim the screenplay meticulously.

The cast of Prison was recruited by Marmstedt with a similar emphasis on economy. "Don't count on getting your regular salary," he told them, "because this is an artistic film and one has to sacrifice something for Art." Bergman's sacrifice involved not getting paid at all, other than 10 percent of the profits, and of course—as Bergman was to note in his autobiography—there never were any. In the role of the director (significantly called Grande) Hasse Ekman was paying off a debt to Marmstedt, who got him his film-making debut in 1940 when he was 24; son of Gösta Ekman (a star of the silent cinema), with whom he appeared in Molander's Intermezzo (1936), Hasse Ekman was famed as a writer, actor and director in the 1940s, promoted by Marmstedt as a "rival" to Bergman—who referred to him, however, as "unswervingly loyal and helpful." He was also married to Eva Henning.

Celebrated as the first Elvira Madigan (1943), Henning was happy to appear in many of her husband's films, including Royal Rabble (1945), The Banquet (1948), and probably his best-known Girl with Hyacinths (1950). Playing the confused and discarded wife in Prison, she brought, Bergman notes, "a totally unexpected tone of pure sorrow to the film, and does her scenes absolutely beautifully with her austerity, her warmth, and her sense of humour." He adds that "Doris Svedlund was lovely too. It was important to me that she should look like the typical Swedish movie whore: it is, after all, a story about a soul, and she is the soul. Doris shone with her own enigmatic light."

Although reunited with Stig Olin for Divorced (1951), directed by Gustaf Molander from a Bergman script, Svedlund's feature film career faltered and she became instead a familiar face on Swedish television. As her excitable but ineffectual admirer, Birger Malmsten, a potent and iconic celebrity for the atomic age, wound up being parodied beside a distorting mirror in Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-Feminin (1966). Deserving of a mention for their blood-chilling portraits of sheer evil are Irma Christenson as the appallingly murderous sister and Curt Masreliez as the most urbane of a long line of rapists in Bergman's work.

The interaction between these weak, malevolent demons has come to be regarded as providing the first clear statement on film for Bergman's own doubts and fears, but Prison in fact contains multiple messages in a patchwork of rhetoric and regret, much enhanced by the authoritative mobility of Göran Strindberg's camera (no sign here of budgetary limitations). The opening images, for example, of a gaunt figure emerging from the mist, embody all sorts of links with what follows—from dreams to cigarette smoke—while the bird corpse at water's edge is a triumph of complex brevity consistent with the unnerving assertion that "maybe this is Doomsday and they forgot to tell us." The snippet of silent comedy oddly accompanied by thuds, and the horrifying immediacy of the suicide sequence, have an inventiveness as if from some other film entirely, not yet completed.

Said to have been rewriting the film as it went along, Bergman finally launched it with a series of explanatory questions: "What is her guilt that she has to live this nauseating life? Is earth Hell? And is there in that case also a God, and where is He, and where are the dead? I wanted to make a film about this, and I wanted to make other people just as agitated and inquiring about it as I am."