Critics reviews

It's the film in which Bergman exposed a deep and decisive artistic fault line in his own work and, in the process, made much of the tremors it unleashed. At the same time, it's also one of the Bergman films that lends itself most readily to parody... Bergman parodies are a genre unto themselves, and, in accounting for the vast dramatic and cinematic power of "The Silence," it's also worth considering the risk of ridicule at its core, a risk that's central to Bergman's cinematic project.

Context has such an integral, inborn relationship to narrative that when it’s stripped away, as it is largely in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence, the effect is shocking and unsettling. One of Bergman’s most abstract films, The Silence is an outgrowth from no foundation, a tree without roots that springs towards the sky regardless with no base of logic to understand its tangled paths.

The Silence, Ingmar Bergman’s final installment in his chamber series, is arguably the most abstract and nihilistic film of the trilogy. As Winter Light explored spiritual bankruptcy, The Silence is an examination of emotional isolation in a world without God – where salvation lies in human connection.