"Ingmar Bergman is apparently determined to explore every possible facet of the human soul. In this latest picture, The Winter Light, he tackles faith, God, knowledge, loneliness, love and hate, meaning of life and suicide. All this through five actors and a church background....Working with modest-seeming devices, this Bergman feature is without elements of sex, is lacking completely in physical violence. It adds up as a sort of philosophical puzzleplay meant for intellectuals. Still it has challenge and provocation. There is a scene when the disenchanted pastor reveals to his mistress how much disgusted he is with her love. It is a scene so brutal and ruthless as to be almost without remembered parallel on the screen."


"I began my review of Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly by remarking that Bergman called it his 'Opus No. 1' and was saying that his preceding 23 films were merely 'etudes' by which he had prepared himself for Through a Glass Darkly and two succeeding pictures, which would comprise a trilogy. I then said that 'if these things are sincere, and not casual nothings tossed off for publicity purposes, Bergman may be approaching the end of his vogue.' The passage of a year has not changed my feeling that Through a Glass Darkly is a specious, and even a dishonest, film. But Bergman's Opus No. 2, Winter Light, has changed my mind about Bergman approaching the end of his vogue. Winter Light is his best picture to date. Certainly it is his most finished film, and the one freest of adventitious theatricalities, and of truckles to the organized claques among the world's 'consumers of culture' which he so often has courted....Winter Light is the kind of film that proves the motion picture is an art. With it Bergman enters the company of the world's foremost living director, Carl Th. Dreyer, to whose work Bergman's own now bears resemblance."


"Winter Light must inevitably be appraised as a contemplation of the state of Christianity today—or of the efficacy of the clerical function. When Mr. Bergman has his pastor—whom Gunnar Bjornstrand plays with icy rigidity and aloofness—administer communion to his diminished flock with bleakly mechanical formality, it can be nothing but a slap at the emptiness of ritual. When he has him brutally repulse his pitifully doting mistress—whom Ingrid Thulin plays with almost unbearable debasement—this can be nothing but a display of the cleric's complete deficiency in the compassion and love of Jesus. When he shows us a pastor unable to say anything to help a poor man (Max von Sydow) knotted by nightmare fears of the atomic bomb, he is surely offering his opinion on the helplessness of religious comfort in these dark times. And when he has his man cry at 'God's silence,' he must be meaning this as the cry of all mankind. Surely Mr. Bergman would not make such a film without meaning it to be symbolic. And it is on the inevitable score of its shattering symbolism that he must have known it would be challenged and criticized....But the vividness with which he has presented this cold and relentless display of spiritual poverty and pathos cannot be criticized—at least, not for its expression in brilliant poetic images. Mr. Bergman's actors, as always, are as sensitive as actors can be, and his camera still frames compositions that fairly pierce one with a nameless poetry. When at the end his pastor stands in his empty, lonely church and proclaims in the words of the service that the whole earth is full of the glory of the Lord, a vibration in the image strikes to one's marrow. Mr. Bergman may not be praised for it, but he has made a thoughtful, engrossing, shocking film."


"A powerful, stripped-down story. Bergman's artistry as a writer and director and sophistication of his actors, however, avoid the easy answers that surface simplicity might imply. In fact, Bergman demands that his audience supply the answers. A taut film, its final message lies in the beholder's heart."


"Routine stuff from Ingmar Bergman, the metaphysician of the middle class. God is being petulantly silent again, driving a poor priest (Gunnar Björnstrand) to the point of distraction. Much suffering, none of it very illuminating."