“It’s revolting, it’s disgusting, it’s pointless…”

Words can’t express how much I truly hated this movie for around 99% of its duration, but the words above spoken by one of the characters themselves almost do. I even took a 24 hour break after the first half hour. I thought that of all Bergman’s movies, this would be the one I would absolutely love, so I was amazingly disappointed. But in the hour or so since the final frame, it’s been slow to leave my thoughts. Its power can’t be denied, that’s for sure – the fact that I hate it does nothing to change that, if I’m honest, it probably is one of the best movies ever made (it just won’t be going very near my top lists).

One of the huge reasons I figured I would like this movie is that long before I got to see The Exorcist, which came out a year after this, I read Roger Ebert’s review, in which he mentioned Cries and Whispers in the opening sentence (“The year 1973 began and ended with cries of pain. It began with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, and it closed with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.”) so they’ve forever been tied together in my mind (Ebert’s reviews on Microsoft’s Cinemania CD-ROM were, for a time, my best film tutor, and often my best way of ‘experiencing’ some movies, lol) Ebert says “no two films could be more different,” despite their themes being similar, but I was pretty amazed by the parallels – Cries and Whispers, really, is just The Exorcist minus the possession. Needless-to-say, I would heartily recommend William Friedkin’s more outright horror movie over Bergman’s so-called masterpiece; and, if you’d prefer a similar Scandanavian statement on the meaning of life, I’d recommend Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves sooner.

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