Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
As children in the loving Ekdahl family, Fanny and Alexander enjoy a happy life with their parents, who run a theater company. After their father dies unexpectedly, however, the siblings end up in a joyless home when their mother, Emilie, marries a stern bishop. The bleak situation gradually grows worse as the bishop becomes more controlling, but dedicated relatives make a valiant attempt to aid Emilie, Fanny and Alexander.
Bergman's swan song is a richly layered magnum opus blending memory, myth, and theatrical artifice into an extraordinarily personal family epic. The plot moves with the weight of a 19th-century novel — warmth giving way to gothic menace and ultimately cautious reconciliation. The ensemble acting, particularly Jarl Kulle and Jan Malmsjö, is uniformly exceptional. Sven Nykvist's cinematography is among the finest of his career: candlelit interiors, deep amber tones, and compositions of painterly grandeur. The novelty is singular — no other film so seamlessly fuses bourgeois realism, supernatural suggestion, Jewish mysticism, and theatrical self-reflexivity into one coherent vision. The ending, while thematically resonant and affirmative, is slightly more discursive and less cinematically urgent than the film's blazing middle sections, preventing a clean sweep of fours.