Last night I refamiliarized myself with an Ingmar Bergman film that might be the closest this great director ever came to doing a horror picture (other than, perhaps, "Through a Glass Darkly," and of course, "Scenes From a Marriage." LOL!). The film in question is "Hour of the Wolf," from 1968 (original Swedish title: "Vargtimmen"), starring Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann. In this B&W stunner, a couple comes to a very isolated island. The husband is a famous painter, and his wife of some five years is now pregnant. The artist, we soon gather, is very close to going mad, as he keeps seeing visions that may or may not be real, including bird people, a woman whose face comes off, and other monstrosities. He also thinks back to the time when he killed a young boy, although whether this ever truly happened or not is unclear. Liv, at one point, asks if two people who live together will soon start to resemble one another and think like the other, and I suppose that Bergman feels that that is indeed the case, as she too starts to see visions. There is no way in the film to ever tell what is real, what is memory, what is hallucination, what is symbolic and so on. Bergman achieves a creepy atmosphere almost effortlessly from the very first scene, in which Liv talks to the camera and tells her story in flashback. Ingrid Thulin, another Bergman regular, appears as Von Sydow's former flame in a surprisingly topless sequence. This is a beautiful film to look at, with outstanding cinematography by another Bergman regular, Sven Nykvist, and the acting by the two leads, need I even say, is world class. It is a picture that will surely be seen differently by everyone who experiences it, and is most certainly very open to interpretation. It is NOT a film for the lazy viewer, and is surely not an easy film. But it is a fascinating one, to be sure....

This film plays on all the tensioned strings of love as the most powerful emotion--the most direct segue to insanity. Love is something we want to happen selfishly, but by its very nature requires a mutual, balanced, and undivided emotion. The madness that ensues in these characters is clearly tied to the various imbalances that occur: unrequited love, partial love, projections of the desired state of of the loved one upon the loved one, incompatibility torturing those who lust for love, sexual lust, and most of all...the permanent scar left upon those who loved truly, and lost. The sheer all-encompassing nature of this film, the fact that it touches on the madness behind so many forms of love is a testament to its concise power. Interestingly--unlike most films and art films which attempt only to share a story of the human experience or to evoke with us an emotion--Hour of the Wolf is also very much a practical film, because above all, it is a warning.

The quote in the film that I mention does lead onto other 'happenings', as Max von Sydow recounts the Hour in question - as he fumbles to light candles in the dark.With such, it does sound like this film's going to be about werewolves and vampires and such, but this is all human, the area of darkness that Bergman often visited and probably no more so here than with any other film. It's like he's made a feature of all the ghostly and demonic thoughts and dreams he's ever had and stuffed them all into one movie.Which is actually no bad thing but I would suggest that so many ripe and vivid nightmares make for a great chilling horror chiller and less his usual area of excellence, the study of human psyche and persona. At one point, our troubled artist with lots of history to block out describes being locked in a wardrobe as a child where a little monster that ate children's toes lived and from which he couldn't escape. Since watching Hour Of the first time round I read in an autobiography that Bergman's profound sense of doom and depression stemmed from being accidentally locked in a mortuary as a boy. My skin crawled in recognition of this scenario when von Sydow describes the story about the wardrobe....is there a lot more in Hour Of that's biographical?Whichever way you want to take it, the beginning has more relationship and personal drama going on whilst from 45 mins on, when 'The Hour of the Wolf' is flashed up, it's hallucinatory hell, much really quite absurd but also really rather effective at being chilling and scary.Liv Ullman, as the artist's wife, who discovers these dark secrets in his diaries is intense and excellent, as always, but I would still stand by saying that Hour Of isn't as deeply profound as some say - and possibly, if one tried to dissect it all too much, you'd be starting to experience some of those nightmares too!My slimline DVD is part of the 4 disc The Ingmar Bergman Collection.

The Hour of the Wolf is not one of my top 5 favourite Ingmar Bergman films, but is still an outstandingly good film in my eyes. I do think that it does need about three or four more viewings, as first time you may be confused or irritated. That was the case with me actually, I wasn't sure what to make of it first time, three viewings later I loved and appreciated it. Maybe The Hour of the Wolf could have told us more as to why Johan was tormented so much. That said, there is much to love. The story is not the deepest or most focused of Bergman's films, but does have several moments especially the deliciously nightmarish puppet sequence that stay with you forever that makes you satisfied still. The cinematography and close-ups are truly haunting and the images breathtaking to watch. The music is wonderful, with some of the best use of Mozart I have seen or heard in any film, the direction from Bergman is superb and while it doesn't provoke thought in the way The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries do the script doesn't feel too stilted. The characters are at least intriguing, the most successful being the sinister Lindhorst, who is played splendidly by Georg Rydeberg. Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman have given better performances in Bergman's films, and it is not to do with that they're not good, it's just that Sydow in The Seventh Seal and Ullman in Autumn Sonata are performances rank as two of the best performances across Bergman's filmography. Von Sydow is suitably haunting and stoic, and Ullman is wonderfully expressive. Overall, not one of my favourite Bergmans and not something everybody will adore but on repeat viewings it came across to me as an outstandingly good film. 9/10 Bethany Cox