Through a Glass Darkly

A writer holidays on an island with his ill daughter, her husband and his young son. She has just left hospital and says she hears a voice through a crack in the wall. The film takes place with four people on one island over a little more than a day. The narrative does not make the illness a puzzle; its real subject is the father continuing to write his daughter's collapse into his notebook, and admitting it to himself. Ingmar Bergman directed; it is the first of three films later grouped as a trilogy. Harriet Andersson and Max von Sydow lead. It won the foreign film Academy Award. Before watching: it is short but very dense, and it tries to show mental illness from the inside. The closing line about God was, by Bergman's own account, an addition he later regretted.