Joanna Hogg continues her look back at her troubled, exciting salad days with this followup to The Souvenir, one of 2019’s best films. Photograph by Josh Barrett / A24 / Everett Collection. Bergman Island will make you want to make something to hug a loved one like you haven’t seen them in ages (maybe you haven’t) and to hop on a boat bound for the Baltic, notebook in hand. But there is a sneaky depth here, a murmur of hidden significance creeping out of every old floorboard. At first glance, the film seems like a slight little reverie.

Bergman Island whispers with melancholy, rustles with gentle humor. Mia Wasikowska sensitively embodies Chris’s fictional construction, wandering the same windy Swedish paradise where Chris has found herself. Just how many meta layers comprise Bergman Island is a question the film begins to ask of itself when Chris’s idea becomes manifest, a story within the story. She might be Hansen-Løve herself, or she might just be another in this sterling filmmaker’s cast of carefully drawn lead characters. Vicky Krieps, watchful and glowing, plays Chris, a filmmaker struggling towards an idea for a new film.

This year saw many films about the aches and fires of creation, but few were as delicately, persuasively wrought as Mia Hansen-Løve’s graceful mood piece.

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