Review: 'Bergman Island' captures with heartbreaking detail the ups and downs of creativity and inspiration

Suffering, of the romantic and artistic varieties, plays out beautifully in Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately droll “Bergman Island,” set in the perfect place for such painful introspection: Fårö Island.

Fårö is the place that the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman called home, and where he shot some his most famous films. It’s also, as Hansen-Løve depicts it, a tourist haven for introspective cinemaphiles who want to overdose on Bergman’s brand of Scandinavian melancholy. There’s even a “Bergman Week” there every June, where film lovers attend panels and tour the sites where Bergman worked.

Here, it’s where married screenwriters Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps, from “Phantom Thread” and “Old”) have come for a week’s escape from parental duties — their daughter is staying with Chris’ mom — so they can write their next scripts. They are set up in one of Bergman’s former homes, where the caretaker cheerfully tells them the master bedroom is where Bergman filmed “Scenes From a Marriage,” “the film that made thousands of people divorce.” Tony and Chris opt to sleep in the smaller second bedroom.

Tony is a Hollywood director, specializing in dark psychological horror thrillers, one of which is screening during the weeklong Bergman festival. Chris, who is less sure of her writing skills, who remarks that “movies can be terribly sad, tough, violent — but in the end, they do you good,” starts working at a desk in the small windmill near the main house.

As Tony and Chris go looking around the island and encountering other Bergman-heads, Hansen-Løve inserts some subtle commentary about the ups and downs of fandom. Bergman may have been one of the greatest filmmakers to have lived, but his fans are sometimes no better than any other fandoms, Trekkies of the bleak emotional wastelands. Some of the locals, our couple soon learns, resent the foreigners descending on their town, while others — like Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), who shows Chris the Bergman-centric spots the tour buses don’t show — embrace the town’s connection to this legendary filmmaker.

Well into the film, Chris is ready to tell Tony about the story she’s writing. As she does, we see the story play out, with Mia Wasikowska (“Crimson Peak”) and Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie in the lead roles. Chris’ movie, like this one, is set on Fårö Island — and sometimes the line between stories gets a little fuzzy.

Hansen-Løve — known for such films as the ‘90s club-scene drama “Eden” and the dysfunctional family story “Father of My Children” — crystallizes the experience of writing, of taking the material floating around them and assembling that inspiration into something poignant, moving and universal. This would seem to ripe for a dark, brooding film worthy of Bergman himself, but instead Hansen-Løve fashions something light and breezy, while still packing an emotional wallop.

What brings “Bergman Island” into focus are the twinned performances of Krieps and Wasikowska. who only share one brief scene but also share the movie’s beating heart. They embody the storyteller and the story being told, and how the wall between the two is thin and crumbling when the story captures the viewer’s imagination as thoroughly as this one does.

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‘Bergman Island’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 15, in select theaters. Rated R for some sexual content, nudity and language. Running time: 112 minutes.