Face to Face

Jenny Isaksson is a respected psychiatrist standing in for a colleague and staying at her grandparents' apartment while her own house is renovated. Composed and capable at work, she begins to be visited by frightening images and a laughing woman in black, and her outward control gives way to panic, a suicide attempt, and a descent into hallucination in which figures from her childhood return.

The film watches a professional whose defences have long kept feeling at bay lose them all at once, so that the terror she has treated in others surfaces in herself. For a therapist it is a close portrait of breakdown, of the thin line between clinician and patient, and of how early loss can be sealed over rather than mourned. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Actress in 1977.