Torment takes us into the haunted world of a prep-school student (Alf Kjellin) in his first encounters with evil. Terrorized by a sadistic Latin instructor, he becomes involved with a shopgirl (Mai Zetterling) who is also mysteriously threatened by a sexual predator whom she refuses to name. The film chronicles the couple's pathetic attempt to hide from evil in love. Ingmar Bergman's first produced screenplay was a devastating portrait of a schoolteacher he loathed, but Bergman credited the director Alf Sjöberg for having "transformed it into a nightmare" relevant to the times (Europe in 1944), bringing into cinematic play the nuances of a totalitarian environment along with his concern for the individual in that environment. The shots of the school interior have a godlike height, but it is a stern and unloving god, while the torturer, a small and insignificant man, looms large in shadow. In a work of gothic existentialism, Sjöberg effects visuals that recall Dreyer and Escher but conjure up Orwell.