The film’s title is immediately evocative. Autumn represents a season of decay, of harvesting, and of the final blaze of color before the death of winter. For the characters, it is a late-autumn reckoning. Eva (Liv Ullmann), the introverted pastor’s wife, has invited her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), a world-renowned concert pianist, to visit after a seven-year estrangement. Charlotte, glamorous and brittle, arrives expecting admiration and comfort following the death of her longtime lover, Leonardo. Eva, desperate and repressed, hopes for a miraculous thaw in their frozen relationship. The parsonage, with its dark wood, relentless rain, and suffocating quiet, becomes a psychological pressure chamber. There is nowhere to hide from the past, and the initial polite chatter—about careers, about the weather—is merely the ticking of a bomb.