A train cuts through a landscape that has already surrendered to absence. What flows past the window in the prologue to The Silence is not a nation; it is a state of mind, a topography of the soul that Ingmar Bergman, here at the height of his theological nihilism, maps with the precision of a cartographer of hell. The spectral geometries of the city of Timoka, where the characters will run aground, seem to be extrapolated from a metaphysical canvas by de Chirico, but emptied of all romantic enigma and filled only with the oppressive weight of an empty sky. It is the end of the line for the so-called “triptych of God's silence,” and if Through a Glass Darkly questioned faith through madness and Winter Light noted its icy farewell, here Bergman does not limit himself to recording the divine absence: he performs a spiritual autopsy, finding only desperate, feverish, and mortal flesh in its place.

The film is a claustrophobic Kammerspiel, sealed in the stagnant atmosphere of a hotel suite that becomes an existential purgatory. On the one hand, there is Ester (Ingrid Thulin), the cultured translator, the terminally ill intellectual, clinging to words as a last, futile refuge against the decay of body and spirit. Her illness is not only physical; it is the illness of reason in an irrational universe, the cancer of consciousness in a world that has ceased to communicate. On the other hand, her sister Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), the primordial force, the sensuality that rebels against logos through eros. Anna does not seek to understand, she seeks to feel. Her body is her only desperate affirmation of existence, a blunt weapon against the emptiness that surrounds her and that Ester tries, in vain, to verbalize. In between, like a silent seismograph of their inner tremors, is Johan (Jörgen Lindström), Anna's son.

Bergman orchestrates a duel that transcends family psychology to become a philosophical contest of almost Dostoevskian stature. Ester is the intellect who, like Raskolnikov after the crime, discovers the futility of her own mental superstructure in the face of the horror of reality. Her translations, her desperate attempt to build semantic bridges, crash against the wall of a foreign and incomprehensible language, that of Timoka, which is a metaphor for every language, incapable of healing the wound of loneliness. Anna, on the other hand, is a creature of the underground, who responds to crisis with a primordial stammer: sex. Her feverish search for physical contact with an unknown waiter is not lust, but an extreme form of bodily prayer, a pagan ritual celebrated on the altar of a dead God. It is the carnal answer to Ester's metaphysical question. The two sisters are not simply characters, but incarnations of irreconcilable principles, spirit and flesh tearing each other apart as in a Strindberg drama rewritten by Samuel Beckett.

And then there is Johan. His silent wandering through the hotel corridors is the true visual and thematic heart of the film. He is the innocent observer, Adam before the fall in an Eden already in ruins. His perspective is ours: an attempt to decipher the incomprehensible hieroglyphics of the adult world. When he encounters a troupe of dwarf actors dressed in baroque costumes, the sequence takes on the contours of a Fellini-esque apparition (8½, released in the same year, is the sunny and chaotic counterpoint to Bergman's hermetic despair), but here fantasy is not an escape, but rather further confirmation of the absurd. Johan's world is a grotesque theater where tanks parade down the street with the same nonchalance with which an elderly waiter serves breakfast. It is the Kafkaesque universe seen through the eyes of a child, a trial of which he is unaware. Through Johan, Bergman seems to suggest that the only possible reaction to the silence of the world is an even deeper silence, a pure gaze that records without judging, that welcomes horror and wonder with the same astonished immobility.

The photography of Sven Nykvist, an essential collaborator, is a miracle of chamber expressionism. He does not merely illuminate the scene, but excavates it, engraves it. The light filtering through the windows does not redeem, but exposes the dust, the sweat, the texture of Ester's diseased skin, the taut surface of Anna's muscles. Each frame is an essay on the materiality of suffering. Black and white is not an aesthetic choice, but a theological one: it is the color palette of a post-divine world, made up only of blinding light and absolute darkness, without the nuances of grace. The sound is equally radical. The “silence” of the title is a deafening score composed of Ester's labored breathing, the ticking of clocks, the humming of pipes, and the wet, brutal sounds of Anna's lovemaking. These are the noises of the body, the only language left after the collapse of speech and faith.

When it was released in 1963, The Silence caused an epoch-making scandal, not so much for its nudity as for its brutal honesty. Ester's masturbation scene, so clinically desperate, had nothing erotic about it; it was the extreme gesture of a soul trying to feel alive in the body that was betraying her, a short circuit between mind and flesh. Critics and censors saw pornography where Bergman had staged the most desolate of prayers. But the real obscenity of the film, its intolerable challenge, lay in its total absence of consolation. There is no catharsis, no redemption, not even the tragic nobility of defeat. There is only waiting in a room, while outside the world, perhaps, prepares for another war. It is the world of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a heap of broken images where the sun beats down and the dead cannot even decompose.

In the end, Ester leaves Johan a note with a few words translated from the Timoka language, including “hadjek,” which means spirit, soul. It is a testamentary bequest, a last, pathetic attempt by the intellect to convey meaning, a fragment to prop up against its own ruins. But the train leaves again, taking Anna and Johan away to another place that promises nothing different. The film does not end, it stops, leaving us with the echo of that silence, which is not peace, but the white noise of the universe that has stopped talking to us. The Silence is a terminal work, a scorched earth aesthetic that marks a point of no return. You don't “watch” it, you experience it like an illness, a fever of the soul that, once contracted, leaves a permanent scar on our retinas as viewers. It is the masterpiece of an artist who had the courage to stare into the abyss and record, with terrifying lucidity, its perfect, deafening emptiness.