Bergman is cast very much against type in this darkly atmospheric film. Her Anna Holm is a disfigured and embittered young woman whose revenge is to blackmail illicit lovers at the peak of a happiness she can never know-because of her face. But behind her distorted visage and vicious personality crouches a little girl whose world was destroyed, and it is this role that Bergman develops most subtly. With classic soap-opera inevitability, the husband of one of her victims is a plastic surgeon, but now we have a beauty amid beasts-sinister, greedy blackmailers abound-and Anna Holm plotting a murder. In the film's pivotal scene, a kiss from a child succeeds where a surgeon's knife failed-and Bergman (with the help of some luminous lighting) transforms “before our eyes” in a wholly internal special effect. “A woman's face” becomes “a woman's place.”