With the cancellation of the dress rehearsal until the evening, Marie takes a boat across to the island where she met Henrik and remembers their playful and carefree relationship.

Following the evening dress rehearsal, Marie talks with the ballet master, who recognises her single-minded devotion to her dancing and understands her problems, and then to her current lover, a journalist called David, with whom she seems to be in the process of breaking up.

Marie decides to let David read Henrik's diary and then open up to him about her past experiences in order to explain her conflicted feelings and emotional coldness.

The reviewer also praised Gunnar Fischer's cinematography and the performances by Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjellinin and Mimi Pollak.

"[3] Stig Almqvist from Filmjournalen described the filmmaking method as "miraculous", writing that Bergman "belongs to a handful here and there in the world who are now discovering the future articulation of film, and the result can be revolutionary.

Many of the themes (whatever one thinks of them) that Bergman later expanded are here: the artists who have lost their identities, the faces that have become masks, the mirrors that reflect death at work.

Although it still deals with the theme of young love that dominated his earliest films, it contains the first inklings of the dramatic intensity and structural complexity that would characterise his more mature work.