This is my first Bergman film. He dramatically uses light and darkness and rustic scenery well. In fact he presents a story in simple black and white terms, straightforward good and evil. Max von Sydow is the head of a Medieval Swedish household who runs a farm. He and his wife keep a very religious house and treat their servants well for the most part. The cook’s daughter (Pettersson) (it’s not totally clear if she is also Sydow’s daughter) is brunette, dirty, a pregnant teen, pagan, a troublemaker, and in Medieval Swedish culture kind of ugly, but not really very ugly. Sydow and his wife’s legitimate daughter (Lindblom) is blond, always clean, spoiled with rich clothes, an innocent Christian girl, which means a virgin. What can I say? I liked the bad girl, I was more interested in her, and shared her jealousy of the perfect much loved daughter. Anyways, these two are sent on a long trip through the forest to deliver some candles to the nearest church. The classic fairytale archetype is here showing how things really begin when the characters venture into the woods.

I’m skeptical of this Christian good, Pagan bad simplicity. Because the parents practice penance by burning themselves with candle wax or whipping themselves with birch tree branches and say prayer before every meal, and the herdsmen have crooked teeth, one sounds like a monster when he tries to speak, and they are desperate and ravenous you are clearly supposed to see who the bad guys and good guys are. A different time period is presented though and one special feature interview with Lindblom suggested it was meant to be a fairytale like story, so I’ve tried to let my uneasiness with the simplicity pass. In fact, Bergman doesn’t let you have these doubts. As soon as you start feeling sympathetic toward the pagan girl, she starts scheming to let the virgin continue ahead in the woods alone, she starts to wish genuine harm will come to the virgin and when it does she stays back and does nothing to try to stop it. The herdsmen (one well-spoken man, another who has had his tongue cut out in some previous fight, and a young boy who all claim to be brothers) spy the virgin and decide to make her their next game. It is quickly revealed that they are liars and thieves, and they brutally rape and kill her then strip her of her valuables and run off. The young boy does not participate, but stays behind as he is told until his brothers come back, but he becomes very sick from what he saw and runs off too.

Later the herdsmen all together again end up at the house of the virgin they killed and left out in the woods. Her father is kind enough to let them come in for a meal, warm by the fire and sleep the night. It is unclear if they realize where they are at first and plan to further victimize the family, but clues are planted at least in the young boy’s head and he begins to feel very guilty. Well the herdsmen make a couple stupid convenient moves and the mother and father come to realize that their daughter was a victim of these men. The pagan girl has now finally stumbled back and comes clean to Sydow about her part in what happened and what she saw. Sydow begins planning vicious revenge for the morning and murders all three. The young boy probably didn’t deserve death by this point, but the two grown men undoubtedly got what they deserved.

Everyone in the house then goes to find the virgin’s body and there is an excellent scene where the father talks to God. Sydow crumbles to the ground and says something like, “You allowed it to happen. I don’t understand you, God. I don’t understand. My daughter was raped and murdered and I took revenge on three lives and you saw it happen.” He doesn’t know any other way to live than through seeking God’s forgiveness though, so he vows to build a church here in this place with his own two hands. And when he lifts his daughter for his wife and himself to hug her one last time a spring of water starts flowing from where her head was nestled in the dirt. But I think the ultimate message is the part where he questions God and vows to build something good (though a church wouldn’t be my choice) in this place where tragedy occurred.