Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
A combination of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Bergman’s fascination with the impossibility of knowing God, Through A Glass Darkly is a wrenching portrait of one woman’s imprisonment within the patriarchal confines of her family.
It’s a story of a family getaway one Swedish summer. There’s Karin, recently released from a mental hospital, as well as her husband Martin, her brother Minus, and the newly-arrived father David, who’s been away in Switzerland for some time. He promised he’d be back for a good long while, but reneges almost immediately, telling them he’s soon off to then-Yugoslavia. So much for that.
Karin has two fathers. An absent blood relation, self-absorbed and uncaring, and another in her partner, a man made patriarchal in his caretaking. She has a brother too, who doesn’t know what to do with his fears for her. Often it comes out as anger, and she works hard to placate her younger brother, her father, and her husband. And then there’s a voice from inside the house, emanating from the wallpaper, telling Karin of God’s imminent arrival…
What the future holds for Karin is unclear. To Karin most of all. Martin and David discuss what the doctors saw fit to share with them and not Karin herself. Prognosis of her illness is overcast, likely to worsen. David laments his absence, mostly in self-pity. Martin professes to love her, but sounds like a weary martyr.
Without agency, but tasked with placating others, Karin’s in an open-air jail cell, and Bergman’s stark black-and-white photography is an austere collection of shots of windswept beaches, a rustic house, and a shipwreck on an island thrown far from the mainland. It feels cast out to its own devices. Shots of his characters are carefully framed with attention to their placement within the whole or how rays of light catch them from outside. Just a little, but never enough. It’s summer, but they’re without shelter and a cold wind blows.
As striking (and sometimes beautiful) Through A Glass Darkly can be, don’t be fooled: It’s a tormented picture about a broken-up family where one member’s illness only makes plain the dysfunction that plagues them all. Much of its runtime is restrained and simmers in slow-burning dread only to erupt near the end, where its chilly breeze turns into an icy gale. The kind that hollows you out and doubles you over.
Bergman’s a cerebral director, and he loves an plagued monologue. It usually makes his films more of a quiet study in human disappointment and bewilderment, but here his writing is lucid in its interplay between characters, and when words fail in favor of emotion, it’s visceral. Harriet Anderson is a marvel as Karin, a girl as good as the Swedish summer day is long, but mercilessly tormented by her illness with no respite to be found in those who should shelter her.
Existential anguish is writ large in Through A Glass Darkly, where elusive figures and their withholding nature proves ruinous. Be it God, parents, partners, there’s a light we seek, and without it, we wilt. Bergman makes his point with a stark poetry, and in the case Karin, offers a damning story of how a patriarchal society lets down the women within it.
Mikkel Frederiksen 