Winter Light has four central people: the priest, the schoolmistress, the fisherman and his wife. The fisherman has read in the papers that the Chinese have an atom bomb and that there is an accumulated hatred among them. He cannot get rid of this thought, he has become petrified in the confinement of his fear. His wife persuades him to go and see the priest after the service and ask him for help.

The priest, however, is a very unhappy man. He mourns his dead wife and he is incapable of feeling any tenderness to the schoolmistress, who worships him and follows him like a shadow. He can no more give the fisherman any consolation, but falls into a crisis, a great isolation in "God's silence." The people around him, especially the schoolmistress, drive him deeper into the crisis. The fisherman commits suicide.

It is then the priest's duty to tell the fisherman's wife, before he goes off to conduct a service in the church of the adjacent parish. The schoolmistress accompanies him and they find the church empty. In spite of this the priest wants to hold his service. When winter twilight falls, he goes up to the altar in front of a congregation consisting of only one person, the schoolmistress. It may be that this service will give him back his lost faith and give him confidence strong enough to show tenderness.

"The middle part of Bergman's trilogy about God's silence—it is flanked by Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence—and the most austere. Winter Light focuses on a small group of parishioners found at the beginning of the film attending Holy Communion. The village pastor (Björnstrand) is realizing he has become an atheist since his wife's death. His faith is further tested by an offer of marriage from a school-teacher (Thulin) tortured with eczema, and the solace demanded by a man (von Sydow) suicidally depressed by the threat of nuclear war. The pastor fails on both counts, and Bergman gives us an ambiguous ending back in the church service—what he himself called 'certainty unmasked.' Never a comfortable film, it's finely acted by a familiar Bergman ensemble, and the awesomely cold vistas form a perfect counterpoint to the spiritual freeze."

"I think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is Winter Light. That is my only picture about which I feel that I have started here and ended there and that everything along the way has obeyed me. Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture. I couldn't make this picture today....but I saw it a few weeks ago together with a friend and I was very satisfied."

Robert H. Adams: "How warm is the cold, how light the darkness?"

Harlan Kennedy: "Whatever happened to Ingmar Bergman?"

Peter Matthews: "The hard stuff"

Philip Strick: "Film Notes"

"Playboy Interview" (1964)