Flicka och hyacinter / Girl With Hyacinths / Das Mädchen mit den Hyazinthen

The central question in this film is why Dagmar Brink committed suicide. Was it lovesickness? The divorced lounge pianist had repeatedly insisted that there was no special “him” in her life. Her neighbour, writer Anders Wilkner, tries to figure out why Dagmar took her own life by questioning people who knew her. The self-appointed “investigator” follows up on their memories, tracing the life of a woman on the margins of society, right up to the party on the night of her death … Indebted as much to Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” (1940) as to Robert Siodmak’s “The Killers” (1946), “Girl with Hyacinths” is structured as a tantalizing puzzle. Set mostly at night and filmed in atmospheric black-and-white, this film noir more than holds its own with its American predecessors. Touching on many taboos of its era, Ingmar Bergman praised it as Hasse Ekman’s “best film in any genre”. Ekman’s wife at the time, Eva Henning (1920 – 2016) is brilliant in the title role of the enigmatic blond.