(Nattlek) Night Games is probably less understood as a film than it is known for the controversy surrounding it. Twenty-two years later, Night Games still shocks, not as "pornography for profit" (Shirley Temple Black, in 1966), but rather, as Albert Johnson wrote in the original San Francisco Film Festival note, as "a moral fable of cinema." Zetterling's portrait of psychosexual dislocation is intended as a parable of the condition of modern Europe. Night Games is the story of a young man's attempt to understand his sexual inhibitions by exploring his incestuous obsession with his mother. In flashback we see how her dissolute and often cruel sexual games in their castle home both tantalized and tortured the small boy. Johnson writes, "Zetterling avoids clichés and boldly utilizes the cinema as an instrument of impersonal but poetic observation.... In her perusal of senseless immoralities and jaded pleasure, Zetterling does not turn the eye of the camera away, but keeps it firmly centered on every nuance of frustration, regret and flickering hope. The result is a masterwork of introspection...." Ingrid Thulin is superb and disturbing as the depraved mother.