The plot focuses on two sisters, the younger a sensuous woman with a young son, the elder more intellectually oriented and seriously ill, and their tense relationship as they travel toward home through a fictional Central European country on the brink of war.

They decide to interrupt the journey in the next town called "Timoka", located in a fictional Central European country on the brink of war.

Later, she watches a show in an uncrowded theatre, and is both repelled and fascinated when a young couple begin to have sex in a seat nearby.

Anna meets the man in their hotel, and Johan witnesses them kissing and entering a room down an adjacent hall.

The Silence is sometimes considered the third film in a trilogy that includes Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light and focuses on spiritual issues.

[3] After Bergman's death, filmmaker Woody Allen theorized in The New York Times that Ester and Anna represent two conflicting sides of a single woman.

[4] English Professor Leo Braudy had earlier made the same argument, identifying Anna with the physical, as she is seen bathing and having sex.

In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag comments, "Again, Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down the street in The Silence as a phallic symbol.

[8] After World War II, director Ingmar Bergman had visited numerous cities in other countries in Europe.

He based the design of The Silence on what he had seen in these travels,[5] in particular in Hamburg, Germany in 1946, after it had been virtually destroyed by Allied bombing attacks.

[16] Bergman stated he "quietly" instructed Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom on the sexual scenes, and that they did not need much convincing to participate in them.

The general instructions for the work of the board had been modified just weeks before the film reached them, and this contributed to its passage, though Bergman claimed that he was not in any real sense trying to test the limits of what could be allowed in mainstream cinema.

[20] The original cut, shown in Sweden and certain other countries, includes a number of brief but controversial sex scenes, showing nudity, female masturbation, urination and a couple making out on the seats of a murky cabaret theatre.

[21][22][23] According to Jerry Vermilye, The Silence "achieved a measure of sensationalistic attention by dint of its scenes of sensuality, mild though they were.

All of which attracted the attention of filmgoers; in Britain and the United States it became a considerable hit, perhaps for reasons of prurience rather than art".

Hordes of less serious filmmakers immediately abandoned all remaining inhibition about depicting whatever crazed and depraved ideas they thought would attract and scandalize a paying audience".

[26] In the United States, The Silence was distributed by Janus Films, and after edits ran 10 minutes shorter than the Swedish version.

[30] Cynthia Grenier wrote that in around 12 countries within months of the initial release, people hoping to buy tickets were "lining up around the block" outside of theatres.

[18] Bosley Crowther wrote "Whether this strange amalgam of various states of loneliness and lust articulates a message may be questionable, but it does, at least, resolve into a vaguely affecting experience that moves one like a vagrant symphony".

"[32] Rose Pelswick of the New York Journal-American concurred the message was hidden in "Obscurity" but Thulin and Lindblom were "strong".

[33] The film has been classified as a "landmark of modernist cinema" with Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), and Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967).

[34] Popular film critic Vernon Young (critic) reversed his position on Bergman and admitted in 1971 that The Silence was an "extraordinary achievement in its way...The Silence rewards effort..."[25] Roger Ebert added the film to his Great Movies list in 2008, writing of "a tone of foreboding" and how "there is no theology in The Silence- only a world bereft of it".