Susan Sontag had already achieved wide recognition as a novelist, essayist, and critic of contemporary culture when she directed her first film, a psychological comedy-drama about the strange influence an exiled German radical political leader and his wife exercise over a young Swedish couple that comes under their sway. Relations between the two couples evolve into a strange mènage a quatre when the younger woman becomes deeply involved in the bizarre and erotic games played by the older couple. Vincent Canby hailed this “visually spare, cerebral comedy” as an “amazingly mature and controlled movie.”