Fanny and Alexander

Fanny and Alexander follows two children in a prosperous theatrical family in a Swedish provincial town around 1907. The opening moves through a large, warm household at Christmas, crowded with relatives and servants. After their father dies and their mother marries a severe bishop, the children move to his austere residence, where warmth gives way to rule and punishment, and Alexander's imagination becomes refuge and defiance.

Critics received the work as a summation of Bergman's recurring concerns: faith against doubt, the theatre set against the church, sensuous life against repression. Many noted its generosity of mood after his bleaker films, its painterly interiors photographed by Sven Nykvist, and its willingness to let ghosts and visions sit beside ordinary domestic detail.

For a clinician, the material opens onto a child's inner world under threat. It shows a boy managing terror through fantasy, lying and silent resistance; a household that holds or fails to hold a grieving family; a punitive stepfather who becomes the object of fear. Sudden loss, the pull between a safe early home and a frightening new one, and the uses a child makes of make-believe run throughout.