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 obviously a lot less trashy but the film still manages to pack a punch and deliver some powerful visuals. This tense and suspenseful story would be the movie that would win Bergman his first Academy Award in 1961 for Best Foreign Language Film.

Based on an old Medieval Swedish balled (which Criterion has seen fit to reprint in the booklet that accompanies this fine DVD, more on that in the Extras section), the story is set in the fourteenth century and follows Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) 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 (Gunnel Lindblom), 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 demonstrates some old pagan rituals to her, and she runs off after Karin.

She arrives in time to see the poor 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 (which resulted in her pregnancy). The three woodsmen eventually kill Karin and steal her fine clothes, leaving her corpse 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 (the always fantastic Max Von Sydow of The Exorcist and more recently 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, The Virgin Spring contains some truly stand out performances, particularly from Von Sydow who is quite intimidating in the final moments of the film when his rage becomes all encompassing. Birgitta Pettersson as the beautiful but naïve Karin, who ultimately pays the final price for being far too trusting of strangers, is also very good, bringing just enough snobbish class to her role for it to work.

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. The movie also makes some interesting contrasts to the pagan rituals of Sweden's history to the Christian theology that, at the time that the film was set, happened to be sweeping the nation. Pay close attention and you'll notice that Bergman is showing us all manner of Norse pagan symbolism throughout the movie and seems to be comparing it to the Christian faith that Karin and her family have acknowledged and adopted as her own.

Video:

Criterion has done a very nice job of cleaning up their 1.33.1 fullframe transfer, which presents the film in its original aspect ratio. The black and white image is exceptionally strong and there is a pleasing level of depth to picture. Overall image quality is quite solid - contrast levels are well balanced and the black levels stay pretty strong throughout. There is some moderate grain and some noticeable print damage present on the image but it isn't anything to complain too heavily about. Overall there's a pretty revealing level of clarity to the transfer and the image handles not only the stark blacks and whites but also the intermediate grays very nicely as well. This DVD does justice to the beautiful cinematography and considering how important the visuals and compositions are to the film's narrative, that's a very good thing indeed. While the Tartan DVD that came out for the British market a couple of years ago looked nice, this new disc from Criterion is a noticeable improvement - The Virgin Spring looks excellent here.

Sound:

The film is presented in its native Swedish language in a pretty decent sounding Dolby Digital Mono mix which includes optional English language subtitles that are free of any typographical errors and are clean, clear and easy to read. The audio mix for the film is quite basic; there are a few scenes with little or no dialogue and during these moments the film makes use of ambient and background noise, which this mix reproduces very nicely. Criterion has obviously gone to some effort to clean the mix up as while there is some audible hiss in one or two spots, it's only very minor and there aren't any problems with distortion during playback. The dialogue is pretty distinctive sounding and it's certainly easy enough to follow even if it doesn't have much range. In short, there's really nothing worth complaining about here and what little musical score is used in the film sounds particularly good. An English dub option is also supplied as a secondary audio option on this DVD.