"Ingmar Bergman's dream play is set in a manor house at the turn of the century where a spinster in her late 30s (Harriet Andersson) is dying. Her two sisters (Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann) have come to attend her, and they watch and wait, along with a peasant servant (Kari Sylwan). The movie is built out of a series of emotionally charged images that express inner stress, and Bergman handles them with the fluidity of a master. Superbly photographed by Sven Nykvist in a style suggesting Edvard Munch, and with blood-red backgrounds, the film is smooth and hypnotic; it has oracular power and the pull of a dream. Yet there's a 19th-century dullness at the heart of it. Each sister represents a different aspect of woman–woman viewed as the Other–and the film mingles didacticism with erotic mystery."

"Ingmar Bergman's magnificent, moving and very mysterious new film, Cries and Whispers...[has] a focus so sharp that it seems to have the clarity of something seen through the medium of fever. Every sense has been heightened to a supernatural degree. Fears, wishes and suspicions never spoken occasionally rustle through the house like wind. We can even hear the newly dead talk, distantly and somewhat reproachfully, mindless of the rapidity with which physical decay sets in....[Cries and Whispers] is not an easy film to describe or to endure. It stands alone and it reduces almost everything else you're likely to see this season to the size of a small cinder."

"All my films can be thought in black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. In the screenplay, I say that I have thought of the colour red as the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I saw the soul as a shadowy dragon, blue as smoke, hovering like an enormous winged creature, half bird, half fish. But inside the dragon everything was red."

"I believe that the film–or whatever it is–consists of this poem: a human being dies but, as in a nightmare, gets stuck halfway through and pleads for tenderness, mercy, deliverance, something. Two other human beings are there, and their actions, their thoughts are in relation to the dead, not-dead, dead. The third person saves her by gently rocking, so she can find peace, by going with her part of the way."

Ingmar Bergman: "Cries and Whispers" (script excerpt)

Lars-Olof Löthwall: "Excerpts from a diary about Ingmar Bergman's filming of Viskningar och rop outside Stockholm 1971" (1972)