Critics reviews

This period, in which Bergman was portrayed as being so out of touch with a quickly changing present-day reality, also produced his most radical filmmaking... Shame is anything but a hermetic, disengaged and non-reflexive film. It subtly frames what should be a central question for any remotely responsible or engaged work: the extent to which art, here the moving image, can respond to the atrocities of “real” history.

The black-and-white palette seems imbued with ashes; the taut long takes and febrile closeups are poised on the edge of collapse, and the chaos is captured with a punishing immediacy. The life of the couple, with their stifled resentments and unfulfilled dreams, also explodes with the emotional equivalent of war; even reduced to feral subsistence by Job-like torments, the lovers mark history with their intimate revelations.