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The film Faithless, a cruel adultery fable directed by Liv Ullmann from a screenplay by the great Ingmar Bergman, was something of a throwback even when it came out in 2000: that sort of sensual dissection of arty middle-class mores was no longer common cinematic currency. Arthouse indulgence hadn’t died out altogether and it still hasn’t today, but, for generations of viewers in 2026 weaned on premium streaming, the lofty waft of the new Faithless TV reboot, adapted from the Bergman scripts by Sara Johnsen and directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), might seem alien.
We’re smoking on planes and wearing corduroy suits in deep maroon: yes, it’s 1977 and, in Stockholm, actor Marianne (Frida Gustavsson) and her pianist husband Markus (August Wittgenstein) are visited by Markus’s oldest friend David (Gustav Lindh), a wannabe film auteur who’s returned from London bruised by his divorce. Episode two introduces a second timeline, in the present, where lauded director David (Jesper Christensen) and veteran performer Marianne (Lena Endre, who was the younger Marianne in the Ullman movie) meet again and reflect on the damage caused by their affair.
Running for six episodes allows more time to explore the genesis of the relationship, and – having ditched the framing device of the film, where the elder David is an unreliable storyteller, imagining a story based on his past – to treat Marianne as a three-dimensional woman with plausible agency.
This isn’t the case in the early instalments as Marianne and David’s interactions are too lost in Bohemian wish-fulfilment. Their interactions drip with sauce from the off: even during the first dinner chez Marianne/Markus, David is weeping about his failed marriage one second and eyeballing Marianne about her “delicious” blackcurrants the next. The following day, with Markus away on a convenient work trip, Marianne and David are out and about in her car, discussing the “difference between eroticism and pornography” as she ferries him to a meeting at a production company and then to look around his effortlessly stylish new apartment, which she suggests he paint “pale, pale blue”.
When they stop off at a fast food joint, they sit on stools with their knees overlapping and catch sight of themselves in the window with a sudden seriousness: uh-oh. It’s one of many occasions when Alfredson throws in a shot of characters in reflection, presumably in homage to Bergman, although it’s almost never Bergmanesque in the sense of the mirror pitilessly showing a person their real self. It’s usually just to get two people in the same frame who aren’t standing next to each other. At times it’s baffling: if you know why the camera pointedly pans from David to Marianne, lingering on her reflected in a mirror at an angle only we can see, do write in – preferably on thick, cream-coloured notepaper in handwriting that suggests alluring creative anguish.
Marianne is hard to understand. She chides David for his latest script’s naive appreciation of female desire and, with David’s charms being angular and boyish – a yardstick for whether you’ll see what Marianne sees in him might be whether you ever fancied an aloof Britpop bassist – it seems their kink might be a teacher/pupil dynamic, despite them both being the parents of children who are more than 10 years old. But then Marianne proves to be infuriatingly complacent: what will Markus think if he finds out, she asks in the manner of a girl fearing a parent’s wrath over obvious bad behaviour. “We didn’t cross the line,” she tells David when they haven’t yet become physically intimate, but have, as any adult ought to know, irrevocably crossed every emotional line imaginable.
The point of the piece will in time be that David and Marianne’s lust has terrible consequences for those around them, especially their children, and for the lovers themselves – we wait to see if the comeuppance will be as brutal as it was in the film – but for that to land we need to feel that the pair have been cursed by an attraction that builds until it can’t be denied. Gustavsson and Lindh’s tepid chemistry kills that. They’re awful people, rather than ordinary people whose urges condemn them to do an awful thing. Despite being written by a woman, Marianne comes off like a male fantasy of another man’s wife, who finds bad writing and blunt wooing irresistible.
And yet Faithless slips down easily, luring us back into the urban chic of the late 20th century, and a world where everyone’s an artist, intense conversations happen over cheap red wine and sex is a universal preoccupation. Its retro pretensions are bewitching enough. Just don’t try this at home.
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