In the dying days of the nineteenth century, three sisters live in a castle by a lake, haunted by the ghosts of their past. Attended by a maidservant, one of the siblings suffers an agonizing sickness. As death takes over the house, the four women must confront loss and mortal suffering.

The existential ordeal of an unfeeling universe is rendered in sumptuous crimson in Ingmar Bergman’s starkly beautiful meditation on human transience. An exquisite cast of the director’s regular collaborators bare the naked truths of the soul, confronting the viewer in devastating close-ups.