[2] A sadistic Latin teacher, nicknamed "Caligula" by his long-suffering students, rules his classroom at a Stockholm school like his kingdom.

One night Jan-Erik is returning home and finds an intoxicated young woman crying on the street.

Caligula comes to the apartment after the principal has left, seeking some sort of forgiveness, but Jan-Erik rejects him and instead walks out into the day to a view that overlooks the whole city.

On 16 January 1943, Ingmar Bergman had been appointed by the Svensk Filmindustri (SF) as an "assistant director and screenwriter" on a one-year initial contract.

Bergman, who suffered illness and was hospitalized during the winter of 1942–43, wrote the screenplay for Torment, for which SF acquired the rights in July 1943.

Originally, Torment ends after all the students have passed their final exam, except for one, played by Alf Kjellin, who walks out through a backdoor into the rain.

I had to add an additional scene in the dead girl's apartment where the principal of the school has a heart-to-heart talk with Kjellin while Caligula, the scared loser, is screaming on the staircase below.

The new final scene shows Kjellin in the light of dawn, walking towards the awakening city.

[4]The film's original orchestral score was written by Hilding Rosenberg, a composer who, like many of his contemporaries (Malcolm Arnold, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Georges Auric, Dmitri Shostakovich) combined a prolific career in concert music with film work in the 1940s and 1950s.

On a personal level, the pro-German newspaper Aftonbladet published a letter by Henning Håkanson, principal of the private Palmgren High School where Ingmar Bergman had been a student.

Our friend Ingmar was a problem child, lazy yet rather gifted, and the fact that such a person does not easily adapt to the daily routines of study is quite natural.

Indeed…I was a very lazy boy, and very scared because of my laziness, because I was involved with theatre instead of school and because I hated having to be punctual, having to get up in the morning, do homework, sit still, having to carry maps, having break times, doing tests, taking oral examinations, or to put it plainly: I hated school as a principle, as a system and as an institution.