Cries And Whispers

Ingmar Bergman believed that red was the colour of the soul, and, because symbolism is at the heart of his cinema, Cries And Whispers is saturated with the colour. It forms a defining motif for a story that lays the souls of both the character and director terrifyingly bare, to reveal only an aching vacuum of emptiness, sadness and absence of love.

In a grand house in the late 1800s, while a battery of clocks (another favoured Bergman motif) ticks relentlessly away, Agnes (Andersson) is dying of cancer, racked with terrible pain. Her two sisters, Maria (Ullmann) and Karin (Thulin), have come to the manor to provide some notional support for their dying sister, although the pair are so emotionally frigid they only really add to her agony. It's left to the maidservant, Anna (Kari Sylwan), to provide some genuine human warmth.

The story reaches its horrific climax when the now deceased Agnes, sporting a terrible, fixed grimace, rises up and reaches out to them. They're sent scurrying from the room, in horror and with a cruel understanding of their horrifying self-isolation and absolute aloneness in the universe.

The film is a terrifying psychodrama, a kind of philosophical horror story, where the physical pain is as nothing compared to the emotional trauma The unremitting pessimism means it's a long way from traditional film entertainment - it's really more concerned with insight. But Bergman's discipline and creativity as a storyteller and director are extraordinary: and this was reflected in the 1972 Oscars, where it was nominated for Best Movie, and Bergman for Best Director.