This film boasts Bergman's first produced screenplay. And though it is said that the screenplay amounted to a devastating portrait of a schoolteacher he loathed in his youth, the realization of Bergman's revenge is very much Sjöberg's. Torment takes us into the claustrophobic world of a prep-school student, a sadistic teacher, and a neurotic shop clerk. Beginning with a grimly realistic portrayal of the teacher's vicious tyranny in the classroom, the film ventures into the development of the immature but nevertheless serious love affair between Jan-Erik (Alf Kjellin) and Bertha (Mai Zetterling). Though Zetterling and Kjellin put in superb performances, Stig Järrel's crazed pedagogue joins the ranks of the great cinema villains. But Sjöberg is loathe to judge even this demented character; whether he is weeping in self-pity or raging with pointed cruelty, the film shifts the burden of condemnation to the viewer. "Bergman and Sjöberg use the doomed romance between Alf Kjellin's high-school student and Mai Zetterling's reluctant prostitute as the springboard for a searing psychological study of authority and the complexes that dictate it," writes Peter Cowie. "Stig Järrel's sadistic Latin master embodies the Nazi personality, which could be found in Sweden as anywhere else during those years. Bergman's early and abiding theme of the rebellious young man, rejecting home and family, seeking release in degradation, colors Torment from the start to finish, but only Sjöberg could have found such arresting visual motifs as the attic where Bertha lives, with its expressionist shadows, and the lofty, echoing school where the harsh shouts of the staff smack of the camps."