The Virgin Spring

The Virgin Spring

Synopsis

The Virgin Spring marks a pivotal turning point in Bergman’s career. It was the director’s first significant collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who would help usher in an emphasis on location rather than studio shooting, and the film won an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, which solidified an international reputation for Bergman that had been building steadily throughout the fifties. Arguably inventing the rape-revenge subgenre, the film expands upon a medieval poem to visualize the grim tale of a young virgin’s deadly defiling and her farmhand father’s retribution against her barbaric murderers. While Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left and countless other horror films have taken their cues from Bergman’s stone-cold procedural, few have recaptured its matter-of-fact intensity or chilling vision of casual evil, a quality most evident in the lengthy assault scene, shot largely in detached wide shots, that triggers the plot. Similarly exemplary is the film’s period detail, which extends from its remote forest locations and rugged costuming to its distilled portrait of Christianity’s blossoming in a 13th century Scandinavia still steeped in Paganism.” – Harvard Film Archive