Luxembourgian star Vicky Krieps grabbed America by the throat with her stunning breakout performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s romantic psychological fashion thriller “Phantom Thread” in 2017. As the intrepid Alma, she held her own against a formidable Daniel Day-Lewis and made us collectively rethink the mushroom omelet as the secret to a happy partnership (of sorts).
2021 has also been a banner year for Krieps, with her co-starring turn in M. Night Shyamalan’s horror flick “Old” and in the English-language debut film of French director Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island.”
“Bergman Island” hit theaters Oct. 15 and is now available for a premium VOD rental price on all digital platforms ($6.99). Krieps stars as Chris, a writer and filmmaker who travels to Faro Island in Sweden with her filmmaker husband, Tony (Tim Roth), where the legendary Ingmar Bergman made his home. This thoughtful exploration of partnership, identity, creativity, motherhood and storytelling is classic Hansen-Love: an absolute joy to watch, as deep themes and existential questions emerge.
Much of the ease and joyfulness of “Bergman Island” is thanks to Krieps, in a preternaturally present and lived-in performance as the independent and free-spirited Chris. Her explorations through the beautiful Faro Island and the places where Bergman lived and worked could inspire, or quench, feelings of wanderlust in the viewer. Throughout the film, Chris describes to Tony a script she’s writing, and these cinematic fantasy sequences starring Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielsen Lie are incredibly sexy and poignant, but also allow Hansen-Love to collapse the layers of storytelling into itself, crafting an incredibly rich, meta-textual experiment.
