Through a Glass Darkly
Through a Glass Darkly
7.9100%92%
Karin hopes to recover from her recent stay at a mental hospital by spending the summer at her family's cottage on a tiny island. Her husband, Martin, cares for her but is frustrated by her physical withdrawal. Her younger brother, Minus, is confused by Karin's vulnerability and his own budding sexuality. Their father, David, cannot overcome his haughty remoteness. Beset by visions, Karin descends further into madness.
CrossCutCritic reviewedMay 5, 2025
Love and Madness in the Silence of God
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There are no demons in this film.
Only a woman, unraveling.
And a God, unmoving.
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In Through a Glass Darkly, Ingmar Bergman gives us not apocalypse, but intimacy —
a four-person chamber play in which the collapse of the soul sounds less like thunder and more like a violin string tightening past pitch.
Harriet Andersson is Karin, newly released from psychiatric care, returned to a remote island with her emotionally absent father, her searching husband, and her adoring younger brother. But what returns with her is not peace — it is a voice. From behind the wallpaper. From another world. A divine visitation. Or delusion. Or both.
Bergman never tells us which.
Because this film isn’t asking “Is God real?”
It’s asking:
“What if He is — and He doesn’t answer?”
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Karin believes God is speaking to her.
That He will come through the wall and meet her face to face.
But when He arrives, He has the face of a spider.
And He tries to penetrate her.
There are no symbols subtle here.
Only the shattering of a woman who sought divine love and found divine violation.
But this is not a blasphemous film.
It is a Job film.
It is a film that takes divine silence so seriously it puts madness in its place.
Because for Karin — as for many of us — the need to be loved by God is not theological.
It is survival.
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Her father, David — a writer who once tried to kill himself — stands for every parent, every priest, every preacher who substitutes art for intimacy and calls it care. He observes Karin. Records her. And then — too late — says he loves her.
But Karin has already fallen.
And that is what makes this a spiritual horror story: Not the schizophrenia. Not the voices. But the human ache for God to come and touch us —
and the terror that, if He does, it might destroy us.
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Yet still... the film closes with a whisper of mercy.
In the final scene, David tells his son that God is love.
Not a presence, but a posture.
Not a certainty, but a choice.
And the boy — still too young to know what words can’t fix — says:
“If that’s true, it’s a great help.”
It is a quiet ending.
But not a hopeless one.
Because what Bergman offers us here is not the comfort of resolution —
but the courage of waiting.
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Through a Glass Darkly is a cruciform film.
Not because it preaches Christ.
But because it suffers into silence.
Because it dares to name the chasm between divine absence and human longing —
and still, somehow, hopes.
Even if God comes through the wall as a spider.
Even if He says nothing at all.
Even if the only echo is our own.
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Because perhaps love isn’t certainty.
Perhaps love is what we choose to believe
when belief feels like madness.
And maybe faith is nothing more
than the last thread we hold
as we fall into the dark—
whispering not that God is real,
but that God is love.
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