I was a Bergman virgin, with only the haziest notions about his fame as an auteur and his influence on contemporary Swedish cinema, when I pressed play. My reaction of intense pleasure at such film-making, with the odd reservation, comes with next-to-no baggage.

Through A Glass Darkly has four characters. There's the ill - the narrative revolves around discovering how ill - Karin (Harriet Andersson), her brother Minus (Lars Passgard - fresh from acting school) and her long-suffering husband Martin (Max von Sydow). They're joined on the island - Faro, in the middle of a tranquil Baltic Sea - by her father David (Gunnar Bjornstrand).

At first, the story revolves around the remote father, his plans to leave again soon for Yugoslavia, his obsession on finishing the draft of his next book. But Karin is the centre of the film's orbit. Her schizophrenia and the tensions it induces in her relationships is the substance of the plot. And so it is essential for the coherence and beauty of the picture that the actor should be good. She is. While Bergman was harsh on his other actors' performances (see DVD review), he was right about Andersson. She carries the role with the right touch of delicacy and force and is a joy to watch.

Bjornstrand feels a little forced, but his role, like all apart from Andersson's, is somewhat underwritten and ambiguous. Von Sydow isn't given a chance to do much, other than look furrowed, which he does well. Passgard, despite Bergman's withering observations, I found excellent. He manages to convey us into the disturbing melding of schizophrenia and incest, which prompts Karin's departure.

Between David's arrival and Karin's departure, there is one night and one day; it all happens between sunsets. This is part of the film's astonishing engagement with its physical surroundings. The light of a Swedish summer is captured magnificently in black-and-white photography that may be helped by not having to cope with colour - witness Erik Skjoldbjaerg's struggle with it in 'Insomnia'(1997) - but is nevertheless a triumph of film-making; a study in the palette of grey.

Here is a family that is shifting through shades of monochromatic tension: the father's imbalance and the daughter's commute between "two worlds". The father's is brilliantly examined in a play his children put on for him when he arrives. The daughter's fits the film's thematic landscape with that of its location. The stirring calm of the water which opens the film, and from which all four emerge after a swim, must be one of the ablest uses of environmental metaphor ever achieved on celluloid. Its false placidity matches that of the family, as we meet it at the start. The uncontrollable surges of its depths become those of Karin's voices, apparitions and strife.

A crucial scene, in which Martin lays into David for his self-centred failure as an artist takes place on a small boat. The water is calm. They're hardly moving. For perhaps five minutes, he harangues him for using life for art; hunting for themes even in his daughter's illness. Subconsciously you assume, as you last saw them set out away from the island, that they're in the middle of the sea. But the sequence's final shot reveals them to be no more than thirty feet from the shore: they will not be able to escape the conclusions of their troubles.

The film is exemplary in its technical assurance. Its relative lack of zooms and continual use of pans is well-judged, as is the exaggerated sound we experience through Karin - her illness has accentuated her hearing. The lighting gives always-striking effects, most of which are beautiful and merited, a couple of which are too much. The respectful camera, which most of the time keeps an elegant distance from the action, always appears in the right place.

So, the odd reservation. The tautness can be stifling, which is appropriate, but also become frustrating, which isn't. This is the first part of a trilogy, and so I can imagine this frustration being soothed by what happens in the subsequent two films - Winter Light and The Silence.

The male roles are too slight for proper balance and yet that may be a necessary price for the intimate show of potent tranquility Karin's character and Andersson's acting gives us. Most importantly, there is a feeling of over-neatness at times. The figure of the manipulative artist and the sexual frustrations embodied in the marriage of Karin and Martin, as well as Karin's relationship with her brother, hark back to Bergman.