Metrograph

The third film in Bergman’s Faith Trilogy stars Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom as Ester and Anna, two estranged sisters, one prim, the other a voluptuary, who, along with Ester’s young son Johan, take rooms in an otherwise vacant hotel in an unnamed Central European country—the local language is understood by neither of the women, and left untranslated for the viewer—that appears to be the battlefield for some mysterious conflict. A ragged howl in a barren world, imbued with a magisterial bleakness by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose handling of Johan’s wandering the hotel’s empty corridors seems an obvious influence on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.