Bergman’s favorite among all his films, Cries and Whispers presents an upper-class Victorian family coping with the final illness and death of a sister (Andersson). Through flashbacks, her two siblings emerge as callous, guilt-ridden, and deceitful women who eventually recoil from their dying sister’s last embrace. Ultimate Bergman actress (and now director in her own right) Liv Ullmann plays the dual role of sister Maria and the mother in this abstract contemplation on the border between life and death.