This afternoon, I saw a high quality drama from Sweden

If I can enjoy The Criterion Channel without too many cases of videos buffering, I will keep the subscription when it'd renew on January 20. This film just had me all the way through, gloomy in a classic way, we follow the backstory on a sad lonely woman's suicide, or was it? It's a part of CC's Nordic Noir collection. There was some Ingmar Bergman stars in here, the tragic lady was the wife in Thirst, one of Bergman's best early films where it's a marriage on the rocks kind of story that Bergman specialized in.

Well here this lady, as remembered by the people who knew her, tell their stories of her to a man who along with his wife take it on as amateur sleuths.

Cinematically it unveils in the manner Citizen Kane did, and for me it was more emotional than that Welles classic, this one is just sad all the way, the painter guy who is played by the man who is very memorable as a humiliated clown in Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel, rang incredibly true to me, how a tortured artist can't get close to people.

The wife of the sleuth combo even has a touching story to tell, how she caught sight of her preparing to kill herself, and she essentially breaks in and ends up soothing her till she falls asleep. That was like the burning flame of hope in the whole film.

If you find it elsewhere than Criterion, and decide to check it out, I cannot endorse it enough, if you want a smoulderingly gloomy tale set in 1950 Sweden.