‘Better to bloom on the road than wither in church...’
The rape-revenge subgenre has reappeared many times throughout horror history, becoming popularised in the ’70s and ’80s with Straw Dogs, The Last House on the Left and Ms. 45. As horror became more polished and glossy the subgenre died away before coming roaring back in the torture porn era, culminating in Promising Young Woman – a film that took the rape-revenge fantasy mainstream. Perhaps the first example of this odd little corner of horror cinema, or at least certainly the most prominent, was Ingmar Bergman’s period tragedy The Virgin Spring. Like much of Bergman’s work, it still possesses a dark power…
Töre (Max von Sydow), the patriarch of a Christian family in medieval Sweden, sends his daughter, Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), and their pregnant servant, Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), to take candles to the church, a day’s ride away. An unspeakable act of violence on the journey changes the lives of everyone involved.
Inspired by a classic medieval Swedish ballad and the work of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (Bergman himself considered The Virgin Spring to be a pale imitation of Rashomon), The Virgin Spring combines family drama with Bergman’s usual preoccupation with religious faith and sexual innocence. And guilt. Guilt is never far from Bergman’s thoughts, and it covers everything here like an impenetrable fog.
While the symbolism is a little on the nose by modern standards, the virginal Karin is always dressed in pure white with porcelain pale skin, while the soiled Ingeri has tangled hair and is literally covered in filth; that doesn’t make the film’s message of religious conflict and generational remorse any less powerful. It helps that von Sydow, appearing in his fifth Bergman film here, is tremendous as the film’s most powerful symbol, his quiet stoicism in the first half of the film contrasting with his righteous anger in the final act, but it is the harsh and natural lighting of Sven Nykvist, in his first of many collaborations with Bergman, that really makes the film shine. He lingers on the various atrocities throughout, filling the screen with harsh, naturalistic lighting, forcing us, in his words, “…to leave aesthetic enjoyment of a work of art for passionate involvement in a human drama”. Quite.
The Virgin Spring is not quite as good as Bergman’s very best work, but it’s still a film suffused with genius and its dark message of sexual violence and subsequent revenge has echoed throughout cinematic history.
