So this is Ingmar Bergman’s directorial debut, and it’s not making anyone’s list of top Bergman movies. It’s an adaptation of a melodrama, where a girl (I guess technically young woman, since she’s 18) from a small town is sought out by her birth mother (portrayed as an aging strumpet) and taken to the big city. There’s a weird love triangle thing, where the mom is interested in this Jack guy, an emo loser who’s her reluctantly kept man; but Jack is more interested in the younger girl, who returns his interest. You get some mom/daughter tension because of that, and it ends in melodramatic tragedy.

But all of that is really just there to kind of drive home that the city and the loose ways of modernity are bad, and the girl is really going to be happy only when she goes back to her small town. Because there she can be reunited with the mother who raised her all those eighteen years, and, uh, the older gentleman who also sorta raised her but now wants to marry her, haha totally cool traditional folkways!

But so okay, this isn’t mature Bergman, let’s grant that. It’s still Bergman enough to portray that honestly: There are ways that the story really wants this to be a happy ending (maybe it is in the book?), but he refuses to make it one, and he makes it clear that the girl remains uncomfortable with this older, almost father-like, guy hitting on her. It’s pretty clear that she’s eventually going to have to give in, because it’s a small town, what else is there, everyone in the place “knows” that they’re meant to be together; but it’s also pretty clear that this is just her soul being crushed in different ways from the quasi-incestuous big city love triangle.

Really, the most interesting relationship in the movie isn’t any of these “romantic” ones — it’s the relationship between the adoptive mother and the girl, where the mother realizes that she’s always framed their relationship as being about her giving to the daughter, but that in fact she’s the one who really needs the younger girl, and the relationship is maybe more about taking than she’s ever been comfortable admitting.

So yeah, this is a movie that’s mostly good in bits and pieces, that kind of “early film by a great director” thing where you get flashes of brilliance in amongst a lot of half-formed clay. But it’s short (like just over 90 minutes), and the portrayal of 1940s rural Sweden is interesting even where the plot gets bogged down in melodrama. It might not be Bergman’s best, but it’s definitely a lot more interesting than some godforsaken Ant-Man movie.