"Wise and poignant, The Road to Heaven maywell be the greatest Swedish film of the 1940s." (Peter Cowie,Swedish Cinema) Sjöberg revived the great visual tradition of theSwedish silents in this parable set in the eighteenth century. When agirl accused of witchcraft is burned at the stake, her fiancé,Mats, strides off along the "road to heaven" in an effort toprove her innocence. Along the way, he falls in with prophets and kings,and, in a beautifully imagined episode, spends Christmas with Joseph andMary. When he meets Satan, he forgets his lofty mission. The film subtlyidentifies with the landscape and folklore of its rural locale, and owesmuch to the performance by Rune Lindström, who co-authored thescript based on his modern morality play. "The morality of theplay, however, is far from naive: utterly skeptical, its underlyingworld image is an absurd and existentialist one°" (EdgardoCozarinsky, in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Richard Roud, ed.)