A dancer has an affair with an older man only to be deserted by him when she becomes pregnant. She has an abortion which sterilizes her. She marries a bookkeeper with whom she argues almost constantly during a trip which culminates in a long train ride. The bookkeeper's old mistress, a widow, is at the same time visiting her psychiatrist. He tries to seduce her, and when he fails, he tells her she is incurably insane.

The widow wanders alone and frightened through the city until she meets a girl she had gone to school with. This is a dancer who had once been a girl friend of the first dancer. Since then she has become a lesbian, and she invites the widow up for dinner and drinks. She nearly succeeds in seducing the widow.

The widow escapes to the street, now gay with Midsummer Eve celebrants. She finally drowns herself by the docks. On the train the wife continues to annoy her husband, now trying to wake him as he sleeps. He hits her with a bottle, believing he has killed her. In the morning he finds it was only a dream. No matter how terrible life is for them, he says, it is better to be together than alone.

"Already evident in Three Strange Loves is the master's self-assured, steely, stripped-down directorial style, which is even more remarkable considering the awkward structure of Herbert Grevenius's screenplay. The film is based on three short stories (written by Birgit Tengroth, who also appears in a supporting role) that have been more or less wrenched together without really fitting. The central and by far the most typical story concerns the furiously unhappy marriage of Rut (Eva Henning) and Bertil (Birger Malmsten) who, when first seen, are tormenting each other during a night's stopover in Basel, en route to Stockholm after a vacation in Sicily. Rut and Bertil are in their early 30's, young enough to mind the loss of mutual passion and old enough to fear time's passage....The excitement of the film comes from the mounting viciousness with which Bergman portrays the no-exit marriage of Rut and Bertil. There is astonishing, virtuoso economy in the way in which he works in these scenes, first in the Basel hotel room, and later aboard a night train crossing a ruined German landscape (the time is 1946). The movie is as tightly controlled, and as potentially explosive, as a one-set stage piece."

"Although the screenplay was adapted by the theatre critic Herbert Grevenius from stories by the novelist/actress Birgit Tengroth, there's a decidedly autobiographical tint to these scenes from an acrimonious marriage, Bergman having recently broken with his second wife. In his first film to adopt a female point of view, Bergman traces the plight of Henning, stuck in a Swiss hotel room with husband Malmsten and wondering whether their union was such a great idea after all. The couple's discomfort with each other intensifies on a train journey through a still ravaged Germany, though the tart exchanges are slightly dissipated by a parallel plot involving the crisis of loneliness slowly devouring Malmsten's ex-lover Tengroth. It's a piercing, rather self-involved film, which never quite ties together its narrative strands and classical references (the legend of Arethusa and Alpheus as a metaphor for men and women surmounting their differences), but Bergman looks at home with the material and his confidence with the camera is developing accordingly. On balance, his strongest offering of the 1940s."

"Thirst does show a respectable cinematographic vitality. I was developing my own way of making movies. I made myself master the ungainly machinery, and it functioned by and large as I wanted it to function. That was always a triumph."

Leonard Quart: "DVD Review: Early Bergman"

Philip Strick: "Film Notes"