Herr Töre has two daughters. Karin is blond, beautiful and good. Ingeri is dark, pregnant and a stepdaughter. Ingeri is envious of Karin, and when Karin is sent to carry the holy candles to church, as only a virgin may, Ingeri slips a toad into her bread.

Karin is stopped by some herdsmen. Innocent, she offers to share her meal with them. As they take the bread the toad pops out. They are angered and their lust aroused. They rape and murder her, and leave her body naked. Later, guests at Herr Töre's farmhouse, they offer to sell Karin's robe to Karin's mother.

After first purifying himself, Herr Töre kills the herdsmen, one by one. He also kills the child that accompanies them.

Going to the spot where his Karin lies dead he vows to build a cathedral on the spot. In answer, a spring is suddenly born on the spot where Karin lay.

"Bergman won his first Oscar for this cruel but unsensational medieval allegory, a tale of superstition, religious faith, rape and revenge set in a 14th century Sweden where the populace is vacillating between Christianity and paganism. On her way to church, the 15-year-old virgin daughter (Pettersson) of peasant parents (von Sydow and Valberg) is raped by two goatherds. Later, in a bizarre twist of fate, the culprits ask for food and shelter at the house of the dead girl's parents. Discovering the truth when the goatherds offer to sell them their dead daughter's bloodstained clothes, the parents exact a brutal revenge. The formal simplicity and overt symbolism (light and dark, fire and water) undercut the potentially sensationalist elements of the material, Sven Nykvist's luminous black-and-white photography conspiring with the austerity of Bergman's imagery to create an extraordinary metaphysical charge."

"The bulk of the picture is a religious-moral charade. It is like looking at a series of scenes of a large medieval tapestry, each well composed, each representing a station on the way to the point of the parable, all of it (except for the visceral moments of sex and blood) rarefied and abstract. We are left with the sense that a lesson has been spelled out—in huge, cloudy symbols of a high romance with God."

"One of the few films that Ingmar Bergman directed but did not write, this 1960 feature recounts a 14th-century Swedish legend on the abundance of God's grace. The period details are magnificently worked into the narrative, and the pace and economy of the tortured Swede's storytelling make his metaphysics infinitely easier to take."

"A film which was one of my shadiest, it seems to me just now, was The Virgin Spring. I admit it contains a couple of passages with immense acceleration and vitality, and it has some sort of cinematic appeal. The idea of making something out of the old folk-song 'Herr Töre of Venge's Daughters' was a sound one. But then the jiggery-pokery began—the spiritual jiggery-pokery. I wanted to make a blackly brutal mediaeval ballad in the simple form of a folk-song. But while talking it all over with the authoress, Ulla Isaksson, I began psychologizing. That was the first mistake, the introduction of a therapeutic idea: that the building of their church would heal these people. Obviously it was therapeutic; but artistically it was utterly uninteresting. And then, the introduction of a totally unanalyzed idea of God. The mixture of the real active depiction of violence, which has a certain artistic potency, with all this other shady stuff—today I find it all dreadfully triste....A fine example of how one's motifs can get all tangled up, and how limitations and weaknesses one isn't clear about—intellectual shortcomings, inability to see through one's own motives—can transform a work as it develops."

Michael Sicinski: "DVD Review: The Virgin Spring"