The Virgin Spring is one of the greatest early Bergman films

Among the many Ingmar Bergman films that I've seen, sometimes multiple times, for some reason I'd never see The Virgin Spring, which won the Best Foreign Language film Academy Award in 1960 (Bergman's only such award?). What a surprise - it's still a terrific film: creating a world that seems both realistic and remote, strong though simply delineated characterization as in a folk tale (which this movie is, at least at its source), frightening and morally complex, well-acted in all roles, and stunningly beautiful to look at, thanks to Sven Nyquist's b/w cinematography and extraordinary lighting effects. The story takes place in medieval Sweden in early spring (Bergman had an uncanny ability to create a medeival milieu; see also the quite different Seventh Seal). The great Max von Sydow, patriarch of a small farming family, sends his beautiful young daughter off to deliver holy candles to the local church (a day's ride on horseback); she comes across a group of goatherds - two grown men and a boy - and is naive enough to stop to offer to share her prepared lunch w/ them, with terrible consequences. We switch back to her farm family, where her parents are concerned that she's a day late in her expected return; the goatherds turn up at the farm house, where they are taken in for the night and offered food and shelter. But the family learns through inadvertence the fate of their daughter, and the patriarch exacts revenge - then seeks God's forgiveness. So yes this film bears the mark of many Bergman films to follow, a man struggling with hardship and with his faith - but it's also more stark and simple in its plot development than most other IB films: a folk tale of course, but also a parable or legend, with suffering, pain, sorrow, and a strangely open conclusion.