The Virgin Spring
<PERSON> final foray into historical filmmaking (until the 1982 epic Fanny & Alexander) is the brutal and prototypical rape-revenge movie The Virgin Spring. Set in medieval Sweden, it stars <PERSON> as <PERSON>, who sends his daughter on a day-long journey to deliver candles to the church they attend. Along the way, she is raped and murdered by a small group of men. 295
<PERSON> finds out, and after a brief grieving period, vows and then exacts revenge of the men. The movie effectively takes this difficult subject matter and uses it to explore a variety of moral themes, particularly vengeance, sexuality, forgiveness, paganism, and redemption. From this point forward, <PERSON> would become almost exclusively concerned with these themes in contemporary settings. While not quite one of his masterpieces, this still a very powerful (and hard to watch) movie. 325