Alf Sjöberg revived the visual tradition of the Swedish silents with this mixture of fantasy and parable. In eighteenth-century Dalecarlia, a girl unjustly accused of witchcraft dies before she is burned at the stake. Her fiancé takes the Road to Heaven to demand justice, and falls in with prophets and kings, and, in a beautifully imaginative episode, with Joseph and Mary. When he meets Satan, he begins to forget his lofty mission, and he dies a rich but lonely man to whom God restores, after death, his idealistic spirit. The original London Times review notes:
“The film not only ranges through the surprising corridors of fantasy but is in itself a thing of ever-changing moods, now approaching close to the colours and contours of realism, now deserting them, using symbolism and discarding it again. It is, however, informed throughout by a kind of radiant naïvety, and, even when it fails in its purpose and stumbles into the commonplace, there are always the photography and the magnificent Swedish landscape to redeem it. Rune Lindström, first as a youth whose simplicity is nearly, but not quite, that of the simpleton, and then as an old man, gives a performance which never falters.”