Eva (1948 film)

Plot

As Bo (Birger Malmsten) returns home from military service, he flashes back to an episode in his childhood where he ran away from home and fell in with a band of performers. One of the performers has a daughter, a blind girl, and seeking to impress her Bo steals a locomotive. The train crashes and the girl is killed. This is first of many intrusions of death into Bo's life.

We also see him dealing with his dying uncle and the body of a German soldier that has washed ashore. This is contrasted with life, as represented by his young lover Eva (Eva Stilberg) and eventually their son. In a Hitchcockian digression, Bo hallucinates killing his friend Göran (Stig Olin) to be with his alluring wife (Eva Dahlbeck).

Bo and Eva escape to a remote island whose only other occupant is a widowed farmer. Eva goes into labor early and Bo and the farmer must fight the current to row her to a hospital. In a montage superimposed over Bo's rowing, we see images from throughout the film, seeming to suggest a struggle between life and death that is going on his mind. Upon his son's birth, Bo feels a resolution to his search for meaning in a cruel world.

Cast