The Serpent’s Egg

In Brief: The most critically damned of all Ingmar Bergman films, the legendary director’s only English-language work is by now ripe for rediscovery and reappraisal as an intensely personal work unlike anything else in his filmography. The Serpent’s Egg is nothing if not peculiar. For his vision of Germany, Bergman seems more reliant on Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and the world of Fritz Lang than he does on history itself. There are occasional odd in-jokes, as when Bauer refers to a strange case being worked on by an Inspector Lohmann, a Lang character that Frobe had himself played. Bergman’s sense of displacement is evident in the fact that characters not central to the story speak in un-subtitled German, and the whole film has the feel of a man (both Bergman and his hero) trapped in a nightmare. This excerpt was taken from a review by Ken Hanke originally published on Feb. 22, 2006.