Ingmar Bergman made only one film in Hollywood-adjacent English-language production, and The Serpent's Egg is the strange, feverish result: a 1977 Weimar-era drama shot with German and American money but stamped entirely with Bergman's sensibility.
What is The Serpent's Egg about?
Abel Rosenberg, an American circus acrobat stranded in Berlin, is reeling from the suicide of his brother when the people around him start dying too, one after another, under circumstances nobody can quite explain. Bergman sets the unraveling against a city sliding toward collapse: bread lines, street violence, and the first stirrings of the anti-Semitism that would define the following decade. As Abel drinks his way through grief and paranoia, he is pulled toward a clinic and a doctor whose motives seem less and less like coincidence. The film moves like a nightmare rather than a conventional mystery, more interested in dread than in resolution.
About the cast
David Carradine plays Abel opposite Liv Ullmann, one of Bergman's most frequent and trusted collaborators, as a cabaret singer tangled up in the same unraveling world. Gert Fröbe and Heinz Bennent round out a European supporting cast that Bergman built specifically for a story about a city that no longer feels like home to anyone in it.
Context & significance
The production was famously difficult: a Swedish director working in a second language, on a reconstructed Berlin set, backed by a Hollywood studio nervous about the result. That friction shows up on screen as atmosphere rather than polish, and the film has since been reassessed less as a failed genre picture and more as one of Bergman's bleakest, most physically oppressive works, closer in mood to his chamber dramas than to any conventional thriller.
Watching The Serpent's Egg on Ktime
The Serpent's Egg is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login. K-Time's Persian-language interface makes it easy for Iranian diaspora viewers to browse and queue titles like this one, even when a film itself has no dub or subtitles.