Two minor characters from Scenes from a Marriage—the combative married couple Katarina and Peter Egermann—receive expanded attention in Bergman’s 1980 TV drama From the Life of the Marionettes, a film that nevertheless departs in significant ways from the earlier work. Whereas the shift to the small screen prompted a new, unadorned approach to shooting and storytelling in the 1977 series, here Bergman reprises several strategies developed in earlier films. While tracing the lead-up to a heinous crime shown in the film’s prologue, Bergman toggles between reality and dream, past and present, and color and black-and-white (evoking The Passion of Anna) across an episodic, chapter-based narrative structure that recalls The Rite. As Peter’s depression leads to increasingly destructive and dangerous thoughts, and Katarina combats her husband’s detachment with fits of animosity, Bergman bears witness to the marital collapse, identifying with Peter’s untreated neuroses while reserving his contempt only for the string of dispassionate psychoanalysts who attempt to compartmentalize Peter’s fractured psyche. A daring study of the tyranny of transgressive thought, From the Life of the Marionettes is elevated by a degree of chiaroscuro craftsmanship that more than compensates for the film’s clearly limited production resources.