Three women live in uneasy seclusion in an isolated house in a backwater California desert town, celebrating their cult-like devotion to each other with esoteric rites. Their murderous attacks on the strangers who wander by seem designed to echo the Manson family, suggesting that the film is an allegory for the dead ends of 1960s utopianism and the American dream. All the same, Willow Springs shares with Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977) a kind of surreal, dreamlike humor, and similarly uses its female protagonists as figures for a fractured or permeable subjectivity.