Film
Scenes from a Marriage
Other titles called Scenes from a Marriage: the 2021 series (HBO).
Bergman's unflinching portrait of a marriage—its intimacy, its cruelties, its refusal to end cleanly. Two people who love and wound each other across nearly three hours, filmed in close-up so you feel the weight of every silence and argument. It's a masterpiece about how marriages aren't just love stories but ongoing negotiations with another person's needs, ego, and capacity for change.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you love slow, unflinching character studies where the drama lives in brutally honest conversations between two people who know each other too well.
Skip it if you want plot momentum or a story that moves outward into the world, since nearly everything happens across kitchen tables, bedrooms and sofas in close, talky quarters.
What it asks of you: It runs close to three hours and asks you to sit with long unbroken takes of people talking, so patience matters more than pace.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
Krisha2016
Glazer's debut follows a family's slow dissolution with the same unsentimental honesty as Bergman. Quiet, devastating moments accumulate into something that feels less like a plot and more like living through a relationship's end.
But It's glacially paced, the dialogue is sparse, and it leaves you emotionally exhausted rather than cathartic. Some find it punishing rather than profound.
Contempt1963
Godard captures the moment a marriage dies in front of cameras making a film-within-a-film. Gorgeous, fragmented, and as much about cinema itself as it is about the couple at its centre. Completely riveting.
But It's in French, shot in Cinemascope, and sometimes deliberately artificial. Godard expects you to watch actively, not passively consume.
A Separation2011
An Iranian divorce case spirals into moral and legal complexities neither party anticipated. Like Bergman, it refuses easy sides—everyone has a point, everyone causes damage. Intellectually and emotionally gripping.
But It's relentlessly cerebral and occasionally feels more like a legal thriller than a character study. The ambiguity frustrates viewers who want clarity.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Scenes from a Marriage
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Synecdoche, New York2008
Both films propose that marriage is the deepest thing we do—worth nearly three hours not for plot resolution but for the full weight of being understood (and misunderstood) by another person.
Kaufman builds a man's marriage breakdown into the foundation of an impossible, collapsing artistic vision. Like Bergman, it treats marriage as the central conflict of an adult life—but filtered through surrealism and creative obsession instead of realism.
But It's deliberately fractured, uses nested narratives, and eventually becomes nearly incomprehensible. Many viewers find it pretentious rather than profound.
More like this (7)
Husbands1970
Cassavetes made this improvisational mess about three men confronting the fragility of their marriages and selves. Raw, jagged, uncomfortably real in ways studio cinema never touches.
But It's 142 minutes of shouting, drinking, and masculine self-examination. Some see it as necessary catharsis; others as self-indulgent performance art.
The Squid and the Whale2005
Baumbach's semi-autobiographical film about a family imploding through intellectual pretension and emotional incapacity. It's Bergman via 1980s Brooklyn—funny and brutal and recognizable all at once.
But Everyone in it is unlikeable and self-absorbed. If you need characters to root for, this will feel like sitting with people you don't want at your table.
Yi Yi2000
Edward Yang's nearly three-hour meditation on a Taipei family moving through love, duty, and disappointment. Every relationship—marriage, parenthood, ambition—gets its quiet reckoning.
But It's slow, dialogue-heavy, and there's no dramatic payoff. It accumulates meaning through ordinariness, which some find profound and others find tedious.
You Can Count on Me2000
Lonergan captures the specific weight of sibling obligation and family damage in a small upstate town. Warm but unflinching, with space for awkwardness and real affection to coexist.
But It's intimate and quiet to the point of invisibility. Easy to respect; harder to be gripped by unless you already care about small-scale emotional truth.
Another Year2010
Mike Leigh's film about a happy marriage slowly revealed as almost obscene in its contentment, watched by friends whose lives are falling apart. Dark, clever, sociologically acute.
But The happy couple is almost cartoonishly smug, and the depressed people around them are treated with something close to contempt. It can feel cold and mean-spirited.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)2017
Same structural DNA: the household as a site of profound incompatibility where people still choose to stay. Both treat domesticity as tragic terrain.
Baumbach's family comedy-drama captures the accumulated small betrayals and unfinished business within one household. It has Bergman's interest in how we fail each other, but in three short chapters instead of unbroken time—fractured, funny, equally devastating.
But It's a comedy that forgets to be funny just when you need a laugh, and it's shot in a deliberately flat, TV-like style that looks deliberately unstylish.
A Ghost Story2017
Both films insist that the marriage itself—the bond between two people—is more real and important than any event that might happen within it. Both see marriage as spectral, persistent, impossible to fully understand or escape.
Lowery strips marriage down to its most abstract: two people bonded by proximity and mystery, trying to reach each other across time and absence. A sheet-covered ghost and the woman he haunts—it sounds silly but it's genuinely metaphysical about how marriage persists after death.
But A protagonist covered by a sheet for most of the runtime, scenes that last eight minutes with no dialogue, a monologue about entropy and meaninglessness. It's closer to a poem than a plot.
People
Cast
Liv UllmannMarianne
Erland JosephsonJohan
Bibi AnderssonKatarina
Jan MalmsjöPeter
Wenche FossModern
Bertil NorströmArne
Anita WallMrs. Palm- Rossana MarianoYoung Eva
- Lena BergmanKarin
Ingmar BergmanVoice of the Press Photographer (uncredited)
Barbro Hiort af OrnäsMrs. Jacobi (uncredited)
Directing
- Ingmar BergmanDirector
Writing
- Ingmar BergmanWriter
Production
- Lars-Owe CarlbergProducer
- Lars-Owe CarlbergProduction Manager
Recommended by
Certified Copy, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, Two Girls and a Guy, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Alice in the Cities, Alaipayuthey, Love Streams, The Shape of Things, The Last Affair, Flannel Pajamas, Loulou