(1957, b/w; Smultronstället, Swedish) Lonely and withdrawn, Dr Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström), a widower and pedant of many years at 78, has an unpleasant dream during the night before he's to be honored in Lund at the cathedral with an honorary degree. Lost among ruined buildings in his reverie, he looks upon a clock lacking hands and then at his own handless pocket watch. When he touches a solitary man on the shoulder, the stranger falls down dead. A bell tolls as a funeral carriage drawn by two horses becomes lodged against a lamp post, dislodging the casket into the street; the corpse is himself.

In the morning he upsets his long-time domestic servant Adga (Jullan Kindahl) by deciding against flying to Lund, instead taking the car; his daughter-in-law Marianna (Ingrid Thulin) accompanies him and does the driving. During the trip she tells Isak that he reminds her of her husband Evald (Gunnar Björnstrand), his son, who hates his father. Saying she feels sorry for him for using his old-world manners and charm to disguise his selfishness and ruthlessness, Marianne reminds him of his disinterestedness in her marital troubles.

They stop at the estate of his childhood home - "The place where wild strawberries grow" - allowing him to reminisce; images from memory become as real as the present, though what he sees he could not have originally witnessed since he was off with his father elsewhere. He sees his cousin Sara (Bibi Andersson), secretly engaged to him, as she's picking strawberries being seduced into a kiss with his good-for-nothing yet bold, exciting brother Sigfrid.

He's jolted back into the present by the voice of a girl, another Sara (also Andersson), whose father, also named Isak, now owns the property; she asks if she and her two friends, Viktor (Björn Bjelfvenstam) and Anders (Folke Sundquist), may ride along as they are off to Italy.

Following a near collision with a Volkswagen (the fault of its driver, Berit Almon), which overturns, Isak takes on two more passengers; but when Sten Almon (Gunnar Sjöberg) berates his actress wife to tears, Marianne bluntly expels the couple from the vehicle.

At a gas station in the district where he had been a medical officer, Isak is greeted by the attendant Henrik Akerman (Max von Sydow) and his wife Eva, who refuse to accept payment for the fuel while paying him compliments for his kindness of years past; they say they plan to name their first born after him.

Director/writer Ingmar Bergman's meditative film on old age explores the dark corners and patches of sunlight recalled after nearly eight decades of life. During a discussion at lunch, Isak entertains the youths with stories before Sara identifies Anders's expectation of becoming a minister ("out-of-date") and Viktor's ambition of earning his medical degree. Since the two men's viewpoints, one of religion and the other of science, clash - Viktor responds to Anders's comment that modern man is a figment of the imagination: "Religion for the people; opium for the aching limb" - they have up until this point agreed not to talk about God or physics.

Briefly paying a visit to Isak's 96-year-old mother, who at first mistakes the daughter-in-law (whom she'd not previous met) for his wife Karin, speaking ill of the dead woman, Marianne's impression is of being in the presence of someone as coldly intimidating as death. Isak is the sole remaining child of her ten offspring; she has 20 grandchildren. Looking through a box of toys and other items, she takes out her deceased husband's pocket watch, absent its pair of hands.

Back at the car, Sara points to the two boys fighting over God's existence, assessing for Isak the attributes of each, especially Anders's attraction for her, though asking: "How can anyone believe in God?"

As they continue the drive, Isak falls into a sleep with "vivid and humiliating dreams: an ominously thick flock of birds wheel above as his cousin Sara holds a mirror before him; he enters a house where an examiner (Sjöberg) asks him the first duty of a doctor (he has forgotten that it is to forgive) before accusing him of guilt and determining a verdict of incompetence.

With the examiner taking him to a familiar location, a scene from 1917 revealing Karin with another man, he hears his wife refer to him as a cold hypocrite with nothing to forgive. The examiner pronounces his punishment: loneliness.

Awake again, Marianne tells him of her breach with coldhearted Evald ("We live according to our needs," his being "to be dead"), who thinks of himself as having been an unwanted child, over her pregnancy. Following arrival in Lund (Agda and Evald were waiting for him and Marianne) and the formal ceremony, the three youths serenade Isak from outside his room, before he lies down, calmed by his reflections, with more memories.

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