Metacritic reviews

You can freeze almost any frame of this film and be looking at a striking still photograph. Nothing is done casually.

At every point, moreover, the actors are supported by Bergman's impressive cinematic skill. His script is a marvel of elision, speaking most eloquently in what it does not say. His photography is both poetic and worshipful. In every frame of the film the still light of subarctic summer silently instills an aspect of eternity, a sense of the presence of God.

Not a pleasant film, it is a great one.

Elaborately rhetorical at the end, this 1961 film nevertheless develops its theme lucidly and with some of Bergman’s most unforgettable sequences.

For the eye and for the spirit, it is a study in varying shades of gray.

The acting is finely modulated; Miss Andersson's flirtation with insanity is a ballet. And the austere beauty of Sven Nykvist's photography has an eloquence all its own.

It has a simple, straight cinematic form, unifying a little tangle of experience within a modest frame. It may strike one as slight and disappointing alongside the intellectual magnitude of such as his film "The Seventh Seal." But it suggests a new mood of its author—introspective, troubled, cold.

The usual fine performances from Bergman's regulars combined with a script that is not as ponderous as much of the director's other works earned THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 1961 and an Oscar nomination in 1962 for Best Screenplay.

A former mental patient and her family spend a summer on an isolated island, in a classic Bergman portrait where family dysfunction and existential terror meet. [31 Jul 2007, p.R1]

This is a noble attempt to shed light on a woman's inner struggle for existence. [02 Jul 2011, p.43]