Roberto Rossellini's films with Ingrid Bergman were years ahead of their time, and remain in America some of Bergman's least known works. Jose Luis Guarner describes Europa '51: “Irene Girard (Ingrid Bergman) is living a frivolous life, when her child, Michele, thinking that she has lost interest in him, commits suicide. In her grief, she turns for comfort to her cousin Andrea, a militant communist, who advises her to work for the material good of others. She goes into the slums, makes new friends and even does a day's work in a factory in place of a woman who is in need. Disappointed by this experience of activism, she turns to giving spiritual help.... Her husband sends her to be examined by psychiatrists at a clinic. Here, because she stubbornly insists that her acts are the result of moral demands and not of temporary insanity, she will be confined permanently....
“Europa '51 is Rossellini's most paradoxical film; one has to look for its significance in its images rather than in its ideas.... It is quite astonishing how a film like this, passionate to the point of indecency, manages to advance steadfastly toward the extreme bareness of the conclusion, which is bathed in an unearthly, Nordic light and has an austerity worthy of Dreyer....”