Acclaimed Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) helms this simmering adaptation of Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman’s classic about infidelity and the emotional wreckage created in its wake.
In 2000, actress-director Liv Ullmann (Scenes from a Marriage) helmed her fourth feature, working from a previously unproduced screenplay by her frequent collaborator Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal). Faithless, Bergman’s piercing tale of lust, adultery, and the agony of desire, earned Ullman a Palme d’Or nomination and became essential to the marital drama canon.
Adapted as a limited series, written by Sara Johnsen (July 22) and directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Faithless once again blends the best of Norwegian and Swedish cinematic talent. We are drawn back into the world of Marianne (Frida Gustavsson, Vikings: Valhalla), a young actress in a happy marriage to Markus (August Wittgenstein, The Crown). When Markus’ best friend David (Gustav Lindh, Queen of Hearts) spends a summer visiting, an attraction blooms between Marianne and David, triggering a decades-long emotional fallout.
Given the breathing room of an episodic treatment, Faithless expands on the lifelong stakes of the affair. Forty years later, David and Marianne — still grappling with the consequences of their passion — reunite. Here, David is played by veteran Danish actor Jesper Christensen (Casino Royale) while Swedish actress Lena Endre plays Marianne as she did in the original film.
Faithless strikes at the core of what makes the heart ache. The echoes of Bergman and Ullman’s original film, handled so capably by Johnsen and Alfredson, ripple out to create new, unanticipated waves of feeling. Elongated across time, Marianne and David’s emotional entanglement reveals passion, remorse, and inevitability.
GEOFF MACNAUGHTON
Content advisory: nudity, sexual content
Screenings
Scotiabank 7
TIFF Lightbox 2
Scotiabank 3