Through a Glass Darkly

A four-handed Strindbergian chamber piece set to the music of Bach, the film features Harriet Andersson as a schizophrenic woman summering on an isolated Baltic island with her doctor husband (Max von Sydow), vulnerable teenage brother (Lars Passgard), and writer father (Gunnar Björnstrand). None of these men in her life are even remotely able to offer her the emotional support and sustenance she requires; when she discovers that her father has been keeping a clinically-detached journal of her illness for the purposes of writing a novel, she breaks down completely.