Lågor i dunklet

It starts off very well and no one can suspect anything. It is an ordinary boarding school with a nice old headmaster and an ideal matron for the boys (Inga Tidblad) who works well with her colleague Edvin Adolphson, a teacher of biology. This ideal order of life at the public school takes at turn when she after a summer holiday suddenly quits her job after having married a new teacher, Stig Järrel, of Latin. The moment he enters the story he completely dominates it and only with his eyes. The direction here is marvellous. The director is Hasse Ekman, who himself plays one of the students, but the way he focuses on the eyes of Stig Järrel is what you will remember of this film. Inga Tidblad as his wife still remains connected to the school and of course meets with her former colleague Adolphson, which turns Järrel beside himself with jealousy, and in that state he is no longer accountable for his actions. To release his fury he turns into a pyroman and is clever enough to get away with it every time. Here the story turns incredulous as he is able to go on burning houses down for twenty years without being detected. When he finally goes too far trying to include Adolphson in a fire the game is over. The amazing thing about this film remains the way Stig Järrel acts and plays controlling his environment with his eyes, and the way the director catches this is a masterpiece of psychology, revealing to the audience exactly how a sick mind works, passing from reason to blatant madness and concealing the transformation by premeditated intelligence. Ingmar Bergman would develop this theme in scripting "Hets" a few years later, where Stig Järrel again is allowed to play a teacher losing control of himself by bolting paranoia.