While vacationing on a remote island, Karin discovers her father has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary means. As she drifts in and out of lucidity, the father, along with her husband and brother, are unable to prevent Karin’s harrowing descent into the abyss of mental illness.
An Academy Award® winner, Ingmar Bergman’s masterful study on madness—with an astounding Harriet Andersson—inaugurates a major theme in the auteur’s work: the existence of human frailty in front of God’s silence. This is his first film shot in Fårö, the remote island where he lived until his death.