The film describes 24 hours in the life of a family on an isolated island in the Baltic where they spend their summer holidays. The family consists of four people: the father, an author (Gunnar Björnstrand), his adolescent son (Lars Passgård), his daughter (Harriet Andersson), and her husband (Max von Sydow). The daughter is the central figure—she is a latent schizophrenic, and her father, her husband, and her brother are involved in and share her fate each in his own way.

Her father is frightened when he discovers that he is prepared to watch the progress of her disease with professional novelistic detachment. Her husband, himself a doctor, is helpless to prevent her relapse into insanity. To her brother, a 17-year-old burdened with problems of adolescence, she represents the female sex with all its mysteries, provoking now repugnance, now attraction, even lust.

The daughter herself changes swiftly and without warning from apparent sanity to madness, and has sufficient self-knowledge to be aware of her own disintegration, her prostration before the dark forces compelling her to degrade herself. As she sinks into insanity, alone with her brother, his own grasp of the real world is shattered, but in the daughter's ultimate tragedy the son and father make contact with a warmth they have never generated before, and hope is held out to both of them.

"Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman's decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy that comprises Winter Light and The Silence, films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman's increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin's mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralyzed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow)."

"Through a Glass Darkly I feel has a serious element of escapism and gross unveracity about it. A sort of desperate desire for security. An attempt to present a solution. A sort of weariness at always arriving at the question and never getting an answer. Like a circus performer who makes all his preparations for a somersault—and then, instead of making his death-leap, simply, with an ironical bow, climbs down. The Germans have a good word for art which isn't pure but is infested with a controlling element. They say it's 'gewollt.' I think that's a fine expression. Naturally there's always a formal demand, an ordering factor: but this wilful imposition of ideas is something else. It's sterilizing, it's anti-artistic....What I write nowadays looks much more chaotic than the scripts I used to write. In the old days I stuck to a hard-and-fast line, and when it went badly the results were what they are in Through a Glass Darkly: it becomes 'gewollt'."

Harlan Kennedy: "Whatever happened to Ingmar Bergman?"

Peter Matthews: "The hard stuff"

Production Notes