‘Thirst’ is one of Ingmar Bergman’s early works and it is quite a revelation to see how soon in his cinematic career he demonstrated a vital technical and emotional competence. The film is a dark study of relationships, centered around the memories of a dysfunctional married couple travelling in a hot, crowded train on a midsummer’s night. The film uses flashbacks and an elliptical narrative structure to unveil lives that appear to comprise a series of regrets and mistakes.

The film prefigures Bergman’s ‘Scenes From a Marriage’ (1973) in its unflinching study of the masochistic relationship between husband and wife. At one stage we are not sure if Birtil (Birger Malmsten) is about to murder his wife, Ruth (Eva Henning). In a brief Hitchcockian moment, he hides in the corridor of the screaming train in the shadows and billowing curtains of a Film Noir mist, waiting, as if to push her from a half-open door. A moment later, he dreams that he has clubbed her to death with a bottle.

‘Thirst’ also forehadows Bergman’s ‘The Silence’ (1963) in its depiction of a war-torn Europe: Partying Germans darken the train’s windows against the dereliction of civilisation that they have wrought; the silhouettes of shattered buildings pass by the windows as the faces of Europe’s starving are pressed against the glass. The affluent pass through this hell absorbed in their own petty emotional and spiritual dilemmas. As Bertil observes, some people just have to survive; morals and spirituality are an indulgence of the privileged.

The tangential strands of narrative explore Ruth and Birtil’s encounters with other partners and their repercussions. Viola (Birgit Tengroth) is abused by a bearded pseudo-psychiatrist who asks her to, “admit that your whole life has been one long mistake” – he also attempts to seduce her with the comic line “I’ll plough your virgin soil”, to which she replies, “You’ll not plough anything”. Her eventual suicide (driven by a rather suspect encounter with a predatory lesbian) is suggested through a few ripples on the surface of the water.

‘Thirst’ certainly equals much of Bergman’s later work in its powerfully affecting use of sound and cinematography and, as an introduction to Bergman, it has the advantage of being a work of consequence that is only 84 minutes long.