This beautiful color film presents a Victorian upper-class family coping with the final illness and death of a sister (Harriet Andersson in a great performance). Members of a decadent social class fall, as in Chekhov. Characters face the nightmare within themselves, as in Dostoyevsky. Characters savage each other, as in Strindberg. Bergman’s favorite among all his films, Cries and Whispers, he said, "touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." The film becomes an almost abstract contemplation of the border between life and death, being and non-being. But for all its pain and intensity, there is a sense in the film that life is going somewhere new and wonderful.