Filmed between October 1961 and January 1962, released a year later, Winter Light was the second in Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's trilogy of 'chamber plays' beginning with Through a Glass Darkly and concluding with The Silence. Bergman told an interviewer in 1964: "I made Winter Light because I really wanted to, and I made it with no concessions to the public. I know it's a difficult film but I think that at last I came close to the truth concerning the spiritual crisis I had been striving for years to describe."

He used to claim—although Fanny and Alexander, twenty years later, might have changed his mind—that Winter Light was of all his films a personal favourite, despite being made under difficult conditions. It was one of his longest shooting schedules, but the shortest of his feature films. Its leading player, Gunnar Björnstrand, was exhausted and ill for much of the filming.

Originally titled The Communicants, the film continues the debate on God's existence and purpose that was the basis for The Seventh Seal and Through a Glass Darkly. It also embodies a number of other influences and concerns in Bergman's work, even dating back to the staging of his play The Day Ends Early in 1947, in which one of the characters was a clergyman terrified of death. Bergman's five-year marriage to Ellen Lundström, who suffered from eczema, is vividly echoed in Winter Light by the Pastor's cruel dismissal of the schoolteacher Marta's love for him, and his disgust at her physical afflictions.

Appearing as it did in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, the film seemed part of a global unease, a general sense of helplessness and vulnerability which found its voice in the cinema through such warnings as Kramer's On the Beach, Losey's The Damned, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and Antonioni's analysis of emotional sterility, La Notte. The death of the fisherman Jonas in Winter Light, a suicide committed in fear of the atomic bomb despite the wretched attempt by the priest to reassure him, was based on all-too-plausible fact.

Although politics were to play an intrusive role in many of Bergman's subsequent films, his first intention in the planning of Winter Light, inspired he said by Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, was to consider a confrontation between faith and doubt. It was a variation on an idea which had often intrigued him: a parson would lock himself in his church and challenge God to confirm His presence, no matter how long it took. This could have an infinite number of consequences, none of them conclusive—but in the process of planning his version, and unable to decide how to end it, Bergman himself encountered an unexpected revelation.

As he later described in his autobiography The Magic Lantern Bergman visited a number of country churches in the Uppsala region looking for exterior locations for Winter Light (the church interiors were constructed in the film studio by Bergman's Seventh Seal designer, P.A. Lundgren). One Sunday he visited his 75-year-old father, who was parish priest to the royal palace at Stockholm, to accompany him. At the little church they visited there was a congregation of four and a priest who complained he was too ill to conduct a full Communion. Bergman's father promptly took charge and insisted on the complete service.

This experience gave Bergman the ending for Winter Light and evidently the tone for the film as a whole, in which the Pastor continually struggles on the edge of collapse. It was an affirmation not only of the importance to the individual of adhering to the routine of worship ("We shall have to see," Bergman observes, " if it is also important to God") but also of the reconciliation between the two Bergmans, father and son, a process already outlined in Through a Glass Darkly.

They had a lot of ground to cover. Bergman's childhood as the son of a parish priest was an often painful and increasingly bitter education. "What was outwardly an irreproachable picture of good family unity," he reported, "was inwardly misery and exhausting conflicts...my parents lived in a permanent state of crisis with neither beginning nor end." Bergman's brother, Dag, attempted suicide. His sister, Margareta, was forced to have an abortion to protect the family reputation. Accused, at the age of twenty, of spending more time in the theatre or in bed than at his studies at Stockholm University, Bergman knocked his father to the floor and avoided seeing him again for several years.

The conclusion of Winter Light, in which the Pastor grimly proceeds with a service prompted by little more than failure, skepticism and despair, is accordingly as much Bergman's acknowledgment of his father's strengths and weaknesses as an illustration of blind faith.

In fact, like the ending of Through a Glass Darkly, which it mocks almost word for word, the film is necessarily inconclusive: there is little sense of recovery either in health or in attitude, no obvious miracle to match of bubbling of The Virgin Spring, not even a love at last reciprocated. And yet, despite the fatalism and resignation, the anguish and the cold, the air has somehow been cleared. What needed saying has been said. "I swept my house clean," Bergman declared.

The sermon, if sermon it be, is told with admirable precision. Justifying its title, the film is an array of near-luminous snowscapes and dusky grey interiors lit by sudden shafts of icy sunlight, as if to purge away the darkness. The performances are astonishing, not just in the main roles but even in the briefest encounters—the fidgeting schoolboy, the puzzled but earnest sexton, the contemptuous organist. As the Pastor (Gunnar Björnstrand) and the schoolteacher (Ingrid Thulin) unleash their confessions, a tirade of misery and thwarted partnership that finds constant repetition in Bergman's work, Sven Nykvist's camera captures screen acting at its finest.