"In some remote part of the Swedish countryside, early in the century, a youth is left alone when his mother dies. He is regarded as an idiot: he has a speech defect, and the unnerving intensity of someone possessed by visions he cannot share or describe. He goes to live with Höglund, the most powerful man in the vicinity. The idiot lives on his own in a cowshed among the animals, reading the Bible, dreaming his visions of choirs of angels...(but) always victimized by Höglund...(who) provokes the idiot into becoming the character of the title. We are so used to regarding Swedish films as the domain of Ingmar Bergman that it is refreshing to find work so different and so vivid. This is a rural parable, filled with a sense of primitive, spiritual energy, but fixed in the rich colors of landscape and the raw emotional truths of common people." -David Thomson