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Widely regarded as the loose
inspiration for Wes Craven’s angry masterpiece of exploitation, Last
House On The Left, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring
is a lot less trashy but still manages to pack a punch and deliver some
powerful visuals and a tense and suspenseful story and is the movie that
would win Bergman his first Academy Award in 1961 for Best Foreign
Language Film.
Based on an old Medieval Swedish
balled, the story is set in the fourteenth century and follows Karin and
her pregnant half sister as they journey from the safe confines of their
simple home through the woods to deliver some candles to their church.
Along the way, Ingeri, the half sister, becomes nervous and so Karin
decides that she should stay with a man that they meet along the way.
Unfortunately, Ingeri gets even more frightened by the man who exhibits
some pagan rituals to her, and she runs off after Karin.
She arrives in time to see the naïve
girl being brutally raped by two men (and a boy who looks on as it all
occurs) but does nothing to stop the proceedings as she wants Karin to
feel the same pain that she felt when it happened to her (thus her
pregnancy). The three woodsmen eventually kill Karin and steal her
garments, leaving her corpse in in the woods to rot in only her
undergarments.
Ingeri runs off into the woods and
the men disappear, only to turn up at the girls’ home, asking their
father, Tore (Max Von Sydow of The Exorcist and Dario
Argento’s Sleepless), for food and shelter for the
night. He lets them into the servants’ quarters for the night and
feeds them. When he and his wife go to bed, she is awoken when she hears
the boy yell. When she goes downstairs she finds him passed out, but the
ringleader of the group is awake and he tries to pass on what he claims
is the elaborate garment of his deceased sister to her to buy, as they
claim to desperately need the money. She takes it upstairs to show her
husband, and the two of them confirm it to belong to their daughter,
Karin, who has not yet arrived home.
SPOILERS BELOW:
When Ingeri returns home and
confirms to Tore that she did indeed witness the very men staying in
their home raping and murdering her half sister, Tore cares not that she
admits to having wanted it to happen. Instead, he becomes enraged and
proceeds to brutally murder not only the two men but also the boy who
accompanied them as well in one of the most intense scenes ever
committed to celluloid.
END OF SPOILERS.
The Virgin Spring is
an intense and disturbing movie that has all of the impact of Craven’s
remake with a lot less of the sleaze. Beautifully shot in stark black
and white and with some stand performances, particularly from Von Sydow
who is quite intimidating in the final moments of the film, and Birgitta
Pettersson as the beautiful but naïve Karin, who ultimately pays the
final price for being far too trusting of strangers.
While the final scene of the film
does feel unnecessary as it brings to the forefront Bergman’s
preoccupation with the human compulsion to believe in a God, it does
raise some interesting themes despite itself and doesn’t even come
close to ruining the film.
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