Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
Reveries, dreams, nightmares, preoccupations with mortality, frailty, connection and disconnect, the impermanence of love and life, swelling sense of lingering regret, loss and loneliness. Wild Strawberries is a soothing though melancholic sequence, tentatively poignant, both surreal and raw, exposing a stilted lovelessness on the continuum of time and memory.
Isak is a man preoccupied with his own mortality and frailty; his thought processes unravel parallels in past and present, as in dreams and reality, perpetuating longings and torments that cling to him still. To sleep is not to escape his thoughts and ruminations, but to sink further into them. And there is such clarity in his remembrances— his mind coughs up and delivers to him perfectly unfragmented memories, uncanny in their lucidity. Though it is his youth that he remembers, in these visions of the past only he remains aged, as he is now. Whilst his body has altered with age, wrinkles distorting his smile, skin sagging, bones aching, the longings and passions attached to these memories remain static, unchanging.
A longing or a hope, severed, suspended, belonging to the past, still somehow reaches he whose sole reality has become his own unthinkable loneliness in the present. Though accompanied by his daughter in law, Marianne, she herself is taciturn and morose, lost in her own melancholy, tormented by her own fears that stasis will breed only more torment, that she will remain lonely whilst those beside her dissolve into some other plane of being from which she is exiled. Isak tells her of his strange dreams, seeing them as some kind of obscure message... as if I must tell myself something I won’t listen to when i’m awake. Marianne questions as to what the message may be, to which he replies— that i’m dead. Although i’m alive. She falters, recognising her husband in his father. A living corpse.
To Marianne as to Isak, the people are symbols rather than reality— the couple to her are a morbid prophecy of her own marriage, whilst the three younger hitchhikers reflect to him the fitful flight of passions of the past. The two undergo their own struggles subtly, silently, suffering in their recollections, sharing sad smiles and recognising at moments the overlap in their struggles, both tragically tangled in a mangrove of reality and dream, past and present, loss and hope for what may be recuperated.