Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Smoreni Zmaj Camera and directing make this film visually perfect. Every frame is black and white art photography, many of which leave you breathless. There's hardly a dialogue in the movie and sound is so naturally blended with picture that at times it seems like a silent movie. There are not many developments and for a while it was quite boring to me, but when it ended I instantly wished to see it again. Bergman doesn't need action and dialogues to tell a story. Camera and body language are more than enough. Ingrid Thulin and Gunnell Lindblom will impress you with their acting, and also with beauty. This movie opens many questions and doesn't provide answers, but rather leaves that task to our subjective interpretations. I was going through some reviews and came across a variety of interpretations, but I think that attempts to explain this film are essentially a waste of time. It's quite enough just to experience it in and for yourself.8/10

framptonhollis Ingmar Bergman has been one of my favorite filmmakers for quite some time. His films "Wild Strawberries" and "The Seventh Seal" were 2 of the first foreign films I'd ever seen, and they helped make me discover more international/art house films that I'd never heard of before.So, here comes "The Silence", a film that I finished watching about 5 minutes ago, and it is one of the most stunning films I've ever seen! It is weird, unsettling, and, at times, quite surreal. Bergman breaks taboos, and creates a film that is incredible in every way possible.The film is wonderful, unique scene after wonderful, unique scene. It doesn't really have much of a plot, but plot isn't always the most important part of a film. In some films, the plot is the most important element, but not here. Here, it is the direction, look, performances, atmosphere, and script.If you aren't a fan of Bergman, you obviously aren't going to enjoy the film, because it certainly looks and feels exactly like your average Bergman film, but it is somehow, even greater then your average Bergman film! Is it his best work? Not really, but, in my opinion, it is certainly one of his finest masterpieces!The film reminded me a lot of "Persona", they're both dark and unsettling looks at the relationship between two women, and are also equally strange and full of great atmosphere.I'm compelled to see this film again sometime soon, because, as you can tell, I absolutely loved it!

Cosmoeticadotcom The last film of Ingmar Bergman's Spider Trilogy, The Silence (Tystnaden), is not as good as the film which directly preceded it, Winter Light, but is closer to it, in quality, than the trilogy's comparatively weak first film, Through A Glass Darkly. This is because the weak link in Bergman's filmic repertoire is his ability to handle sexuality. Through A Glass Darkly has the most of it, Winter Light is nearly void of it, and The Silence has a bit of it, although not nearly as much as the lurid American trailer for the film would suggest. That trailer, available on the DVD, would have one believe that the two thirtysomething sisters in the film, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) were engaging in explicit lesbian sex, of the variety one might see in a 1990s porno film.This is not so, and this film, in essence, is substantially different- both in tone and in substance- from the two other films, which lends credence to Bergman's claims that these films never formed a formal trilogy because not only is the spider God imagery almost absent from this film, but almost all references to religion are gone, as well. It seems that there has been a fatuous critical shoehorning of this film to make it part of a de facto trilogy, but one simply cannot support that claim if all three films are viewed in a row. In reality, this film can be seen as the first half of a duplex of films that ends with Persona, and the Spider Trilogy is really a Spider Duplex, too. It's not really about 'the absence of God', as some critics claim, but rather an almost The Twilight Zone-like film dealing with the absurdities and cruelties of life, regardless of a God or not.Ingrid Thulin, as Ester, is very good as the repressed sister, and Gunnel Lindblom radiates an almost sleazy sex appeal as the horny Anna- which is perhaps the most oft-used name for a Bergman female character, who wishes her sister dead. Seeing the film now, however, it seems laughable to think that this film was Bergman's most controversial to that point, since the sexuality is so tame, even the scene of ester masturbating is really nothing to get excited over (pun intended), even though we see- in an upside down shot of Thulin's magnificently structured facial cheekbones, that Ester is enjoying herself. This eroticism, and the censorship battles over the film upon its release in country after country, made it Bergman's biggest grossing film in his career.The cinematography in this film is more daring than in the two other film's of the trilogy- both in camera movements, the usage of light and shade- especially in the scene where Anna is forced to watch a man and a woman have sex at the dwarfs' cabaret, and in his use of subjective shots from the points of view of the lead characters, mostly Johan. The musical interludes consist mostly of Bach's music, especially The Goldberg Variations, and are deployed well. Musical taste seems to be the only thing the two sisters can agree on, re-emphasizing the old adage of it being the universal language.The Silence is the longest of the three Spider Trilogy films, at 95 minutes, but it seems the shortest, for it is the most quickly paced, with the shortest scenes, and is largely shorn of the long monologues its two predecessors have. It does, however, have the most symbolism of the three films, which again undercuts the mistaken critical consensus that Bergman had abandoned such techniques when he started this sequence of films. And the schismatic sisters in this film prefigure the more melodramatic personality sharing of the actress and nurse in Persona, only in a more dramatically believable and realistic way. Anna is free, sexually wild, and her body's none too subtle motions bespeak this while Ester's hair is pulled back, and she looks a typically Bergmanian severe and sexually repressed, as almost all of Thulin's Bergman characters are. This character goes to the extreme of even declaring she hates the fish-like smell of semen, although to compensate for the character's misanthropy, she looks far more sexually appealing in this film than in Winter Light.Yet, through it all, I could not get the idea that this film was in some way influenced by Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone television series, which was in its heyday when this film was made. It has all the psychological and sociological hallmarks- weirdness in the nonsense language of the foreigners (reminiscent of such Twilight Zone episodes as the one where beautiful people are considered ugly), a child's point of view, tension, deeper issues masquing under the obvious- save for the sexuality and paranormal, that Serling specialized in, and seems far more akin to it than the two other films in the Spider Trilogy. Regardless, it is an excellent film that touches on some quintessential Bergmanian obsessions, and, for doing so, it grabs hard at the human.

pizzazzman2000 A nice change by bergman over several years. I have seen a few of his films, and this film was markedly different, as well as similar to his previous films. One theme which Bergman always harps upon is how human traits, which are normally suppressed by our ability to think straight, get manifested when schizophrenic frenzies take control and maneuver our minds.Here, we have 2 sisters and a young boy, visiting a foreign land on the brink of war, and unconsciously, all three are striving for a way out of this turmoil. Such Striving gives way to a search for a way to stop this quagmire of loneliness, communication gap etc, which acts as the driving force for all three. We see three different sub-stories-one for the little boy, and one each for the two sisters, which become intertwined and clash. The boy,wanders round the hotel with his toy revolver,coming across a group of dwarfs, an old man, etc. One sister is constantly gripped by states of frenzy, which cause her to become at times delirious, with plenty of tripe,and most of the time couped up in her little chamber. The other sister, ventures beyond the four walls, and goes outside, and we get to witness sexual acts, as well as her badmouthing her sister.Overall, a good source of entertainment, and a must-see.