Gunnar Björnstrand

(On Cable TV, May 2022) If you have ever wondered what a horror film directed by Ingmar Bergman would have looked like, there’s no finer illustration of that alternate universe than the five minutes of The Magician in which Max von Sydow’s character “comes back from the dead” and stalks a once-skeptical official in a dramatically-lit attic. It’s a well-crafted sequence, certainly the highlight of a better-than-average film for Bergman. Alas, it’s brief – and the rest of the film struggles to be as interesting. Some of the basic blocks are there – the film is about a travelling hypnotist/magician show that may or may not be supernatural, and the efforts made by the local villagers to deal with those strange people in their midst. Gunnar Björnstrand turns in a very memorable performance as a skeptical doctor, and Sydow himself clearly plays into the mysterious nature of his character. Still, this is a Bergman film and you have to spend quite a bit of time in squalid rural Sweden – and if you’re a cut-and-dried genre fan, this is not a film that explains too much of its mysteries. Still, it’s a step up from much of the lower-tier Bergman I’ve been seeing lately… and it’s got five minutes of top-notch horror.