Critics reviews

Ekman gave Henning—alive today at age ninety-five—her greatest role in Girl with Hyacinths (1950), the first of Ekman's films that I ever saw, and perhaps his best-known outside of Sweden... Because of its structure, some have likened the film to Citizen Kane (1941)... though in eschewing Great Man mythology to investigate the case of a wasted woman, as well as its downbeat atmospherics, it might just as easily be likened to Agnès Varda's Vagabond (1985).

It borrows narrative techniques from "Citizen Kane" (Ekman greatly admired Orson Welles) for a quite different story. The first shots are jagged and fragmented, dialogue heard from out of frame. Like "Kane," only in the end will the audience understand what they've been watching... The fadeout of "Girl With Hyacinths" is a jolter, yet perfectly in keeping with the rest of the movie, and I wouldn't spoil it for the world.

From its dark, near-dreamlike opening scenes, in which a young woman plays the piano at a party, encounters a man on a bridge and returns home—followed by the discovery of her suicide in gritty daylight—"Girl With Hyacinths" ("Flicka och hyacinter," 1950), by the Swedish director Hasse Ekman, is a film of haunting beauty.