Ingmar Bergman's Prison is proof that being well-made from a technical stand-point doesn't necessarily make a film "good." A bizarrely structured film-within-a-film, Prison juggles a number of different stories which all explore a similar idea: that earth is actually Hell. As one of his earliest films, it's fascinating to see Bergman fiddle so intensely with frame compositions, depth of field, and camera movement—much of which is very showy and exists purely for its own sake. There’s even an extraneous silent film sequence. Eventually everything collapses from a "narrative" to a string of successive images and apparently unrelated vignettes. Any philosophical or existential theme he tried to promote was ruined by the narrative pyrotechnics. Again, it’s superb from a technical standpoint. But because of its incoherence it fails to achieve anything it set out to do.
4/10
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