GOD was once a burden to Ingmar Bergman. But that burden lifted long before he died aged 89 last July 30 on the island of Farö in the Baltic Sea. “My top-heavy religious superstructure collapsed,” he once said—and he was relieved.

God was once a burden to Bergman because in his life the Almighty was represented by a forbidding father figure. His father was a strict Lutheran pastor, who frequently locked the young Ingmar in a dark cupboard