This film is interesting in the way it plays with repulsion and desire. The border of the body seems like the border of the self, indicating when a person can go beyond themselves out of love for another. It is a quite bleak view, as even when there is love shown in the film between Agnes, the lamb, and her servant, Anna, there is a quality of repulsion we as viewers are induced to feel so that love seems unreachable.
The duality of the character of Maria/the mother makes her a universal figure raising our own issues with Mother. As Maria she is sensual when she takes in the doctor's finger in her mouth, feeding her ego, yet she fears the touch associated with death. She is almost comical in her selfishness, refusing to help her husband who is bleeding from a self-inflicted knife wound; she recoils visibly rather than reaching toward him which would be the expected reaction. It's also interesting how the doctor, who desires her, tears her apart with his words in hate, just as the sister Karin does to her later, as though in desiring too much, one comes to hate that one is so vulnerable and dependent (as with a Mother). The film shows this painful, infantile disappointment of not getting everything one needs. (This is seen at the end when Maria turns away from Karin and does what Karin probably feared most - Maria rejects her when Karin has opened herself up).
It is interesting that the film shows the scandalous nature of death - in the scene where Agnes calls (from death) for someone to warm her hands, it's asking for love to overcome the physical repulsion that is a natural response to death. Hence one could read this almost a refusal of faith and God - a desire to believe yet unable to. It is reminiscent of Flaubert's story "St Julian the Hospitaler," where Julian must warm the leper's body with his own.
The duality of the character of Maria/the mother makes her a universal figure raising our own issues with Mother. As Maria she is sensual when she takes in the doctor's finger in her mouth, feeding her ego, yet she fears the touch associated with death. She is almost comical in her selfishness, refusing to help her husband who is bleeding from a self-inflicted knife wound; she recoils visibly rather than reaching toward him which would be the expected reaction. It's also interesting how the doctor, who desires her, tears her apart with his words in hate, just as the sister Karin does to her later, as though in desiring too much, one comes to hate that one is so vulnerable and dependent (as with a Mother). The film shows this painful, infantile disappointment of not getting everything one needs. (This is seen at the end when Maria turns away from Karin and does what Karin probably feared most - Maria rejects her when Karin has opened herself up).
It is interesting that the film shows the scandalous nature of death - in the scene where Agnes calls (from death) for someone to warm her hands, it's asking for love to overcome the physical repulsion that is a natural response to death. Hence one could read this almost a refusal of faith and God - a desire to believe yet unable to. It is reminiscent of Flaubert's story "St Julian the Hospitaler," where Julian must warm the leper's body with his own.