Rent The Serpent's Egg (1977)

Bergman’s Bleak Berlin Experiment - The Serpent's Egg review by griggs

If you were being reductive, you could call this a dystopian Cabaret. But The Serpent’s Egg is far more sinister, swapping sequins and song for paranoia and cruelty. Bergman sets his story in 1920s Berlin, a city unraveling under poverty and despair, where fascism lurks in every shadow. The bleakness is relentless, and unlike his more metaphysical work, this one feels earthbound—grimy streets, broken people, and a whiff of something toxic growing beneath it all.

David Carradine plays Abel, an American adrift in this nightmare, and he never quite convinces. Miscast as the haunted drifter, he struggles to anchor a film already heavy with despair. Liv Ullmann, as always, radiates presence, but you wish she were on screen more often—her intelligence and warmth might have given the audience a breath amid the suffocation.

Bergman was long shadowed by youthful sympathies with Hitler, and that knowledge haunts the viewing. The film’s recurring images of brownshirts marching through Berlin carry an unsettling weight, rendered with a detail that feels almost fascinated. Rather than taking a clear stance, The Serpent’s Egg lingers on the spectacle of fascism’s rise, leaving the audience uneasy in ways that surpass Bergman’s usual discomforts. It unsettles more than it enlightens, a grim pageant that gestures at warning but never quite delivers one.