- Search:
- Time Out worldwide
- Web

Film

What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases

The Shame (1968)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Average user rating

1 review

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Bergman's magisterial confrontation with war, set in a characteristically ambivalent decor, either a peaceful farm somewhere in Sweden or a landscape from Goya secreting intimations of disaster. Here live a man and wife, indifferent to the war until it arrives on their doorstep to strip their lives to the bone. Presenting war with shattering power as a blindly destructive force, Bergman uses it brilliantly as a background to the real pain: the way the couple are forced to look at each other, and to realise that the only honest feeling they have about their relationship is shame. It ends with one of the cinema's most awesomely apocalyptic visions: not the cheeriest of films, but a masterpiece.

Author: TM

Time Out Film Guide

Email Tweet Share

User reviews of this film

Technoguy said...

Posted on Oct 29 2007 22:23 This fairly early Bergman is satisfyingly intense and traumatic and unforgettable. yet it is very rarely spoken of or advertised in the list of Bergman best films.I've never seen Liv Ullman play better(exc. Persona).The war scenario smashes into a husband and wife's cosy relationship on an island-like setting exposing like a hurricane it's threadbare nature.Max von Sydow's character seems really cruel: being indirectly resposible for one man's death by witholding money from some enemy troops, also taking a young man off and shooting him. Shame comes out of the ground like oil when this couple become tested to destruction. A marvel.

Report as inappropriate