The artist is apparently going mad. He sits up night after night, staring into his candle, speaking with his wife of his strange dreams (or are they memories?). Bergman ^[1] penetrates the man’s subconscious to extract a series of bizarre nightmares and imaginations. He slips these hallucinations back and forth across the line of reality, so that occasionally what seems to be a dream becomes gruesomely real. This is the case with the most powerful image in the film, an act of necrophilia that becomes a practical joke.

Much of the film retains Bergman’s ability to obtain deeply emotional results with very stark, almost objective, scenes. One night the artist tells his wife of a time when he was a child. He was shut up in a dark closet and told by his parents that a little man in there would eat his toes off, in terror, the child began climbing up on shelves, and boxes, begging to be released.

Another night, the artist tells of a day when he went fishing at the seashore and was joined by a small boy. We see this scene in heavily contrasted black and white: There is a moment when the boy stands behind the man and could push him onto the rocks below, while the man compulsively winds in his fishing line. A moment later, in a fit of rage, the man kills the boy. The question is, did either of these scenes occur, or were they both nightmares? Bergman does not quite let us know.

-- Roger Ebert ^[2](1968)