Såsom i en spegel (1961)

English title: Through a Glass Darkly.
Accurate translation of the original title: As in a Mirror.

A schizophrenic woman is released from a clinic after undergoing treatment and goes to live with her husband, her father, and her younger brother in a deserted island.

What a wonderful idea for a recovering psychiatric patient, to live in a deserted island with her horny teenage brother, her father who had abandoned her when she most needed her, and her caring but feckless husband. Well, that may not be very sound medicine but it makes for a reasonably entertaining drama, albeit one which fills in with dialogue wherever anything beyond the possibilities of its minuscule budget is to be depicted. Some similarly-minded horror films were made, mainly in England, mainly in the sixties, but they relied on images rather than words (needless to say, those films were scorned by critics whereas this one was and still is praised to the heavens). Anyway, what I gathered from this heavily Freudian concoction is that the word 'love' and its two distinct meanings (Eros on one side, which is based on desire and is therefore involuntary; Agape on the other, which is voluntary and based on social or religious constraints) are often confused as a single entity, with positive consequences (e.g. it binds husband and wife together even after desire fades away) and negative ones (e.g. general mental confusion). The title deserves some remarks. As is seen on the top of this entry, the English title is not exactly the same as the Swedish one, due, I think, to a difference in the translations of the biblical verse it is based on (the director mentions in an interview that ancient mirrors were made of bronze and the background of the image were blurry, the accuracy and explaining power of which I cannot vouch for). What is most curious, though, is that in Brazil the release title was a blend of the English and Swedish ones, "Through a Looking Glass", which is funny because it establishes a parallel between 'Karin' and that famous character by Lewis Carroll.

Rating: 51