It's not easy being a young Swedish director operating under the enormous shadow of Bergman. Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) succeeded with his second feature by training his attention on the socio-political concerns of his past, leaving the metaphysics to the reigning master. Raven's End takes place in a working class slum in 1936. Widerberg's reconstruction of the period is admirable; his concern for detail of time and place is more the novelist's. Anders (played by Thommy Berggren), an aspiring writer, is suffocating in the vacuous atmosphere of his family. His father, an unregenerate souse, savors the luxurious life; his mother, a scrubwoman, succumbs to the dreary promise of more stultifying labors. But Anders refuses to put up with this decrepid life. Galvanized by a social conscience, he writes a novel and soon abandons the irreversible misery of his parents for the other side of Raven's End. Using a fanciful and fluid camera to express his exuberant lyricism, Widerberg gives us a strong, somewhat autobiographical account of how the pain of leaving can often equal the pain of staying.