"It has a simple, straight cinematic form, unifying a little tangle of experience within a modest frame. It may strike one as slight and disappointing alongside the intellectual magnitude of such as his film The Seventh Seal. But it suggests a new mood of its author—introspective, troubled, cold. It seems to seek faith—and yet is without faith."


"Through a Glass Darkly [is] a picture that is sufficiently remarkable in itself as a melodrama of domestic catastrophe and is scarcely less remarkable as its maker's personal statement about man and God. In theory it's aesthetically offensive to use the camera for didactic purposes, but Mr. Bergman, far from concealing his gaffe, has boldly called attention to both the personal and the religious nature of the picture. For one thing, he has dedicated it "To Käbi, my wife." For another thing, having taken his title from a famous phrase in St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, Mr. Bergman gives us, as an introductory gloss on the film, the entire verse from which it comes: 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.' What Mr. Bergman has come to know in part he sets down here, in a testament that consists of many beautiful and bitter images and a handful of heartbreaking words."


"Ingmar Bergman, after the fine brio of The Devil's Eye, has characteristically changed pace in his newest film, Through a Glass Darkly, to create a study in insanity that is at once touching, horrifying, and inspiring. I can think of no previous Bergman work so direct, so simple, so precise in its effects, and so unequivocal in its meaning. He seems deliberately to have eschewed the symbolism, the convoluted flashbacks, and the lush imagery of his most popular films to create a new style with its own rewards—all sinew and bone, stripped down to the essentials."


"Through a Glass Darkly is one of the best and certainly the ripest of Ingmar Bergman's creations, a film as subtle as Wild Strawberries but solider in substance—the first film in which Bergman creates a hero who can love and characters for whom the spectator cannot help but care....Bergman's new capacity to touch the heart is not a large capacity, not a teeming oceanic love of all mankind. But it is enough to melt the ice in his irony and to lend his humour a kindly glow. It also pumps some warm blood into his characters, and the warmth has relaxed and inspired his actors: seldom has one film offered four performances of comparable quality."


"Ingmar Bergman says this is his 'most personal film' and that it is his 'Opus Number One'—all his preceding twenty-three films being merely 'etudes.' He dedicates it to 'Käbi, my wife.' If these things are sincere, and not casual nothings tossed off for publicity purposes, Bergman may be approaching the end of his vogue....Through a Glass Darkly is disfigured by the hasty thought and hurried execution which demean most Bergman pictures. Through a Glass Darkly is far from a major work, though it has the rudiments of one. But only the rudiments, and Bergman would have had to expend several years of creative energy to weave them into a meaningful Opus No. 1."


"Few films I can think of have sustained such a pitch of intensity, and dived so deep into the human soul with such a spare amount of comment and, in all senses, of illustration. Acting, landscape, sound, dialogue (as far as one can judge from intelligent-sounding sub-titles), even direction itself in the sense of apparent 'choice,' all seem subordinated to a truth so rigorous it would appal one if it weren't for the exhausted, lyrical hopefulness of the end, in which Bergman seems to be saying not so much that God is love as that love is God."


"If by the end of Through a Glass Darkly, we feel with some regret that Bergman has more asserted the value of love than demonstrated it dramatically within the film, nevertheless, in the uniqueness of his imagery and the intimacy with which he observes some of the details of these four people's lives, he succeeds in reminding us that he is still one of the most distinctive and compelling directors in the cinema today."


"It is among the most mature of Bergman's works and ends on a note of conviction. But the characters can only reach this final state of calmness if they have endured the most intense experiences and scrutiny. If one is prepared to enter Bergman's world, to accept his sudden variations of mood, and to accept in their context his conclusions, one will find this film a sombre but stimulating work of art."


"The first part of Ingmar Bergman's trilogy (with Winter Light and The Silence), elaborating his search for a new interpretation of 'God' apart from the conventional one on which he was raised. Elaborately rhetorical at the end, this 1961 film nevertheless develops its theme lucidly and with some of Bergman's most unforgettable sequences, such as the slow descent of the helicopter as Harriet Andersson screams 'God is a spider!'"