Ingmar Bergman’s 1972 feature is rereleased for its 50th anniversary and it looks even more intimately disturbing and pornographically painful than ever: a supernatural horror-tragedy of three sisters, and nothing could be less Chekhovian. Tableau scenes from a spiritual hell are vouchsafed to us, with cries of pain, surging and insistent zoom shots on troubled faces, together with inner-life static portraits, whose subjects stare dispassionately at us out of the screen in half-shadow while the whispering of despair susurrates on the soundtrack.
In the early years of the last century, or the late years of the century before that, Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is living alone in the house where she grew up, attended by the family maid Anna (Kari Sylwan). Lonely, wretched Agnes has never married and is now dying of cancer. Her two married sisters Maria and Karin have come home, supposedly to nurse her, although they are selfishly concerned with their own unhappy marriages; the real business of caring is of course down to Anna, who sometimes devotedly gets in to bed with the patient in a strange pietà.
Agnes’s suffering secretly disgusts and horrifies her sisters, intensifying their own disappointment with life and fear of death. As they wait for her end to come, the long days stretch past in a weirdly eroticised torpor, to the pitiless ticking of a clock and the ting of the quarter-hour that pierces like a hypodermic needle without morphine. (And despite having seen this film many times before, this is the first time I have noticed that no one talks about ordinary pain relief.)
Maria (Liv Ullmann) has inherited her late mother’s beauty, vanity and melancholy caprice; Ullmann also plays the mother in flashback. She has been having an affair with David (Erland Josephson), the supercilious and cynical doctor who calls at the house to attend to Agnes, who may also be in love with David: his clinical touch is the nearest thing she has to a caress. David’s affair with Maria started when he came to tend to Anna’s ailing child who has since died: a chilling ill-omen. Maria’s pathetic husband Joakim (Henning Moritzen) has made an impotent attempt on his own life, clearly suspecting the truth about his wife. Karin (played by the magnificently charismatic and powerful Ingrid Thulin) hates her husband Fredrik (Georg Arlin) and herself, a loathing that culminates in an unwatchable scene of self-mutilation; her dread may be due to being complicit with Maria in some unsubtly indicated incestuous transgression. They are desperate for the ordeal of Agnes’s death agony to be over. But it appears that death is not the end.
Cries and Whispers has the impact of a scary movie; for all its refinement and severity – and the echoes of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1955 film Ordet – there is also something diabolically inspired in the aggressive way it confronts the audiences with its physicality. (Ari Aster said that before shooting his horror film Hereditary, he showed Cries and Whispers to his cast.) This film burns, like ice held to the skin.
• Cries and Whispers is released on 1 April in cinemas.
