Film

Torment

Name: Torment
Genre: Drama
Released: 1944
Cast: Stig Järrel, Alf Kjellin, Mai Zetterling, Olof Winnerstrand, Gösta Cederlund

Other titles called Torment: the 2025 film.

Drama
Very dark

A 1944 Swedish masterpiece about a sadistic schoolteacher who torments a sensitive student and the troubled woman caught between them. It's claustrophobic and psychologically bruising, shot with Bergman-era intensity. For anyone who wants to see cinema at its cruelest and most honest.

TMDb rating

3.5

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if....1968

Lindsay Anderson's incendiary film about institutional abuse and rebellion in a British boarding school. Surreal, furious, and structurally daring in ways that feel decades ahead of its time.

But The mix of realism and fantasy can feel uneven, and the anarchic ending might feel more metaphor than catharsis.

The 400 Blows1959

Truffaut's heartbreaking portrait of a misunderstood boy damaged by the adults around him. Tender and angry at once, with one of cinema's greatest final images.

But The pacing is deliberate and the suffering accumulates slowly. Not a film that offers easy comfort.

Kes1970

A working-class Yorkshire boy finds transcendence training a kestrel, only to have it destroyed by a crueler world. Ken Loach at his most poetic and devastating.

But The brutality of the ending is unsparing. It's a working-class tragedy, not an uplifting underdog story.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Torment

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Fanny and Alexander1982

Directed by Bergman (who worked on Torment's script), it revisits the same scenario—a tyrannical authority figure and a child's psychological survival—but with the full weight of his later metaphysical vision.

Bergman's long autumnal masterpiece: two children trapped in a hellish household with a sadistic stepfather. It has Torment's DNA but expanded into 188 minutes of operatic family trauma.

But The length is demanding, and Bergman's late style is leisurely. It's not a thriller; it's an excavation of pain and grace.

The Silence1963

Bergman on psychological paralysis and isolation in a decaying hotel. Two women, no easy answers, and the weight of incommunicability pressing down on every frame.

But It's glacial and abstract. If you need plot momentum or conventional drama, this will test your patience.

Persona1966

Bergman's most formally audacious work: a nurse and her mute actress patient, and the slow psychological dissolution between them. Hypnotic and cruel.

But It's willfully obscure. Bergman offers no explanations, and some will find that pretentious rather than profound.

We Need to Talk About Kevin2011

A mother reckons with her son's violence and her own complicity. Lynne Ramsay makes formal beauty from moral horror—it's visually ravishing and emotionally toxic.

But The fragmented structure demands active viewing. Tilda Swinton's performance is so cold it can feel inhuman, which is the point but not everyone welcomes it.

A Clockwork Orange1971

Kubrick's extreme vision of violence, rehabilitation, and state control. Formally brilliant, narratively fierce, and genuinely unsettling in ways most films don't dare attempt.

But The sexual violence is graphic and casual. It's provocation as method, which some will read as exploitative rather than critical.

The Vanished2020

A Turkish family camping trip spirals into paranoia and psychological torture when a neighbor's child disappears. Claustrophobic, morally murky, and relentlessly tense.

But It's a bleak watch that withholds catharsis. The ambiguity will frustrate anyone who needs clear answers.

In the Realm of the Senses1976

Nagisa Oshima's audacious film about obsessive love and erotic fusion between a servant and her master in 1930s Japan. Transgressive, sensual, historically crucial.

But The explicit sexuality is unsimulated. It's banned in several countries for good reason, and it's not titillation—it's relentless and sometimes ugly.

The Ascent1977

Like Torment, it's about the slow psychological disintegration of a human being under unbearable pressure—but it's spiritual rather than interpersonal, and uses landscape as a character.

Two Soviet partisans climb a frozen mountain while being hunted. Tarkovsky transforms a pursuit into a spiritual and psychological ordeal. Bleak, hypnotic, formally extraordinary.

But It's a Russian art film from 1977. Prepare for glacial pacing, minimal dialogue, and the kind of asceticism that makes most viewers impatient.