The main thing here is the excellent script by Ingmar Bergman, which concentrates entirely on the woman played by Gun Wållgren, a very special and brilliant Swedish actress, who excelled in dubious parts like this - one of her films is called "The Girl and the Devil" in which she plays a double role, an innocent girl and an heinous witch. Here she excels in rendering a very complex female character real, and she is convincing in every moment of it, superior, experienced, handling her men as puppets, playing with them perhaps a bit cruelly sometimes, but always in perfect control; while Alf Kjellin as the leading man is a very poor character, weak and coward and really totally without character as probably a very spoilt child. The supporting characters are excellent as well, and the direction honours the script. Ingmar Bergman was an outstanding script writer, especially in his early films, like in Alf Sjöberg's "Torment" ("Hets") 1944, one of the greatest of Swedish classics. This film shows many similarities and associations to the great masterpiece but rather as a shadow, while the characterizations are the more outstanding.
Review of Woman Without a Face
