After eight years at sea, sailor Gösta returns to Gothenburg, where he finds work at the port. In a dance club, he meets a young woman who recently tried to kill herself. Berit and Gösta spend the night together. While they are spending a weekend in a country hotel together, she tells him how she spent time in a reformatory, and about her relationships with a variety of men. He is deeply disappointed in her. Reform school, suicide, abortion, pre-marital sex – with no fear of taboos, Ingmar Bergmann explores the realities of Sweden’s post-war society. Influenced in structure by Italian neo-realism and indebted in content to French existentialism, this early Bergmann film set in a port city investigates the question of an individual’s responsibility for their own life.