The Silence

Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963) is an Ingmar Bergman drama you can watch online on iFILM. Two sisters and the young son of one of them are stranded in a half-empty hotel in a foreign city where no one speaks their language.

Ester is gravely ill and barely leaves her bed. Anna goes looking for warmth elsewhere, wounding her sister on purpose with a careless affair with a local man. The boy, Johan, wanders the echoing corridors, peers through strangers' doors and meets a troupe of dwarf performers — the only spark of life in the place. Tanks roll down the street outside; the country is sliding toward war, though Bergman keeps that war off-screen.

The Silence closes Bergman's so-called trilogy of faith and caused a scandal on release for how frankly it showed sex. He films it almost wordlessly — the drama lives in faces, in silence, in Sven Nykvist's camerawork. Slow, heavy cinema for anyone willing to watch the bond between close people come apart. Stream The Silence (1963) online on iFILM.