Two women are travelling on a train with a young boy. The boy. Johan, is the son of one of the women, Anna. The other woman is her sister Esther, who is seriously ill, and is seen consumptively coughing up blood. Johan left to his own devices, watches the endless queues of army tanks passing by from the train windows. Esther's illness forces them to stop off in a small town Timoka, staying in a large but sparsely populated hotel. The town has dispossessed people on horse drawn carts carrying all their possessions passing through. Whatever place the family have arrived in, this is a country riven by some sort divisive conflict.
So there is a constant and palpable unease surrounding them. Feeding into the frisson of tension between the two women. So much about who they are, how each sees the other, is inferred or mentioned only in passing. Esther's previously dependent relationship on her deceased Father, seems to have been an entirely unhealthy one. There is strong incestuous air between Esther and her sister, one that Anna wants to break free of.
There is silence because there are secrets that cannot be openly spoken of here. No one is really talking about what they want, only what they don't want. Why have they ended up here? What was the original purpose of their 'little trip'? Were they originally trying to escape a home situation, and a husband, that was itself unbearable?
The Secret has a minimal script with little meaningful dialogue. Bergman wished in retrospect he'd gone further on cutting back the amount of spoken lines.There is also, for 1963 a remarkable amount of nudity. Film distributors being extremely nervous about it at the time.The Silence has ended up as one of Bergman's top rated films. It's a superb, almost text book example of a film devoted to the 'show not tell' movie doctrine.
It does not appear clear at first, why this film is part of Bergman's Faith Triology. If anything it is bereft of religious commemt or spiritual feeling, which is probably the point. Here is what an absence of faith looks like. One could, however, read it as an allegory. Everyone is travelling through life without any sense of purpose, seeking love as self gratification. The Father ( God ) is already dead. Without his presence the women's relationship, and the broader world, has become dysfunctional, surrounded by wars, death camps, incest, untold amounts of suffering. All sorts of dubious preferences now fill the moral vacuum of 'the God shaped hole'. The world is a much colder hostile place and lacks human feeling, without any common point of reference. Everyone is dissatisfied with everything and everyone.
In the previous two films individual characters were struggling with doubt or losing their faith altogether. In The Silence there is no faith left anywhere. There is nothing but nihilism and a whole wide desert of meaninglessness. These few individuals are rattling around Europe robbed of any overarching sense of purpose. Staying in a mostly empty hotel in a collapsing society. Esther is drowning her real feelings in a diet of cigarettes and alcohol. Anna tries through seeking casual sexual encounters to fill her sense of emptiness. But niether finds their strategies really satisfy them or provide them with a sense of renewed direction in their lives. This is a despairing Godless world that feels completely moribund, and goodness is it bleak.
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