So what’s fun about the completionist nature of this Ingmar Bergman box set is that you get to see how even a master filmmaker turned out some real duds. This is arguably the weakest Bergman film I’ve seen so far.

It’s basically a comedy (though there’s a bit of voiceover at the start explaining how it straddles the line between comedy and tragedy—fair enough), but it’s not like funny funny. It’s really a chronicle of a couple’s marriage falling apart, with flashbacks to how it began, a mix of happy and sad moments along the way, and the looming question: will they get back together (or I guess, stay together—they’re not divorced yet)? And, well, the intro already told us it has a happy ending, so the answer isn’t much of a mystery.

One thing that’s very clear from this movie is that Bergman just fundamentally doesn’t believe in marriage as a workable institution, even as he believes it’s deeply important. (If you didn’t know he’d been married four times and had a zillion affairs, you could probably guess just from watching his movies.)

There are some interesting elements here (the family bits in particular), and it’s definitely not bad, but a lot of it feels too broad, and much of it doesn’t ring true. It plays like an Ingmar Bergman movie filtered through a mainstream rom-com lens, and that really doesn’t work.

(Also, I just don’t think women have ever been quite as lustfully attracted to their gynecologists as this movie would have you believe.)