Two sisters, Ester the older, Anna the younger, and Anna's son are traveling on a train into a foreign city whose language they do not understand. Ester is not well. They stay in an arid hotel. Ester is trying to hold on, almost sexually, to her sister. Her sister, however, goes out. In the theatre she sees a couple making love in a nearby box. She picks up a man herself and returns to the hotel.
The little boy wanders through the empty halls of the hotel. There is a company of dwarfs, and they take him to their room and dress him as a woman. He plays with the kind old porter who becomes lost in his own memories. He hears Ester confront Anna with the man in her room.
Tanks roll through the city streets. Ester is dying. Several times she thinks she has died. She thinks her sister has left. But her sister comes back for a last dialogue in which Ester tells her why she hates heterosexual relations. She gives Anna's son a paper on which are written some translations of the strange language. They leave. Ester will die now.
"Whether this strange amalgam of various states of loneliness and lust articulates a message may be questionable, but it does, at least, resolve into a vaguely affecting experience that moves one like a vagrant symphony. Mr. Bergman has ordered his images as though presenting a musical score, with separate themes projected and developed and with supplementary phrases struck....But, unfortunately, Mr. Bergman has not given us enough to draw on, to find the underlying meaning or emotional satisfaction in this film. They say when it was shown in Sweden, its several erotic scenes were so detailed and explicit that they literally shocked audiences. Perhaps these scenes are essential to a superheated mood required for the psychological context. But obviously these scenes have been cut or trimmed for this market. Here the whole thing is rather tame, mystifying, and morbid.
The Silence is almost like death."
— Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (1964)
"Ingmar Bergman's 1963 conclusion to the trilogy that began with
Through a Glass Darkly and
Winter Light. The film shocked audiences (and censors) with its graphic portrayal of purely carnal sensuality; but the staggering integrity with which Bergman portrays the oppressive atmosphere of a world that becomes more and more incomprehensible (instead of less and less) as two sisters (
Ingrid Thulin and
Gunnel Lindblom) grow older makes it one of his most perfectly realized efforts."
— Don Druker, Chicago Reader
"The final part of Bergman's trilogy (after
Through a Glass Darkly and
Winter Light) is a bleak and disturbing study of loneliness, love and obsessive desire. Sisters Ester (
Thulin) and Anna (
Lindblom), together with the latter's young son, book into a vast but virtually empty hotel—the only other guests are a troupe of dwarf entertainers—in a country seemingly occupied or threatened by war. Once again exploring the conflicts between physicality and spirituality, Bergman candidly portrays Ester's latent lesbian desire for her sister, as well as Anna's own compulsive sexuality (she picks up a waiter and brings him back to the hotel). Despite the overt eroticism, the sisters' craving for emotional warmth is filmed in a cold, objective style; in this way, Bergman's severe symbolism emphasizes both the seeming impossibility of, and the absolute necessity for, human tenderness in a Godless world."
— Nigel Floyd, Time Out
"My original idea was to make a film that should obey musical laws, instead of dramaturgical ones. A film acting by association—rhythmically, with themes and counter-themes. As I was putting it together, I thought much more in musical terms than I'd done before. All that's left of Bartók is the very beginning. It follows Bartók's music rather closely—the dull continuous note, then the sudden explosion."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman
