9. From The Life of The Marionettes (1980)
Katarina and Peter Egermann are not happily married. They were last seen arguing in Scenes From a Marriage. Katarina seeks out the affections of other men whilst Peter's psyche disintegrates into turmoil and confusion. He accosts a hooker at a peep show, who shares his wife's name, and strangles her. He tops the merriness off by sodomising her dead body. For his extreme nuttiness he is confined to an asylum at the end of the movie. Following in the footsteps of his horror movie Hour of the Wolf, with From the Life of the Marionettes, Bergman paints a similarly dark and disturbing view of one man's twisted mind. There are no funny moments or light hearted relief to temper the bleakness. It is just a raw portrait of a man's psychological collapse and descent into homocidal rage, goaded by his wife's flagrant cheating. This was the last film Bergman made during his tax exile in Germany. Its obscurity is not surprising, few people want to take a voyage into the heart of darkness which is as black as the Ace of Spades.