Following the success of The Seventh Seal, Bergman again turned to a medieval wellspring, this time a folk song whose simplicity and stark violence are recreated in purely visual terms in the director's first collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist. A girl in the bloom of innocent sensuality, the apple of her father (Max von Sydow)'s eye, is raped and murdered; a young boy watches his brothers perform the act, and suffers along with them the father's terrible revenge. The strange beauty of Bergman's medieval forays is that early Christianity seems foreign and mythic to contemporary viewers, which lends a similar flavor to other films: are the struggles of Winter Light any less Manichaean than those of The Virgin Spring? Conversely, no film in his oeuvre could be more modern in terms of its Freudian overtones, and the agnosticism its very surety provokes in the viewer.