THE HOUR OF THE WOLF Movie Review

Vargtimmen

Artist goes nuts; audience pays price. That's the cinematic version of frontier justice, perhaps. Still, Ingmar Bergman's 1968 The Hour of the Wolf—the story of a painter who vanishes, leaving behind only the diary in which he describes his descent into madness—is the closest the great Swedish director has ever come to making a psychoanalytical slasher film; a Jungian Halloween. Max von Sydow is the tortured, imploding Johan Borg, whose wife Alma (Liv Ullmann) conveys the story of his breakdown to us in an increasingly grotesque series of Gothic-style flashbacks. Some of these are powerfully suggestive images; Johan's terrified nights of insomnia, during which he tries to convince his wife of his terror by demonstrating to her—and us—how long one minute can be during the deepest period of the night, or “hour of the wolf”; a centuries-old woman who peels off her face; a dead body that suddenly springs to life. They're amazing and chilling sights, photographed with impeccable artistry by Sven Nykvist. But do we really want to see the hallucinations of a psychotic artist presented in such a straightforward, literal-minded manner? Somewhere in here are hints of the convergence of fantasy and reality, and the difficulty the artist has in distinguishing between the two at certain, critical junctures in his life. All well and good, but The Hour of the Wolf is such a non-stop flow of nightmares that the whole picture is like Ray Milland's one-minute “DTs” sequence in The Lost Weekend. One minute can be a long time, as Johan correctly points out, and The Hour of the Wolf has 88 of them. Sometimes, less is more.

NEXT STOP … The Magician, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, A Page of Madness

1968 89m/B SW Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin. Erland Josephson. Gertrud Fridh, Gudrun Brost, Georg Rydeberg, Naima Wifstrand, Bertil Anderberg, Ulf Johansson; D: Ingmar Bergman; W: Ingmar Bergman; C: Sven Nykvist; M: Lars Johan Werle. National Board of Review Awards ‘68: Best Actress (Ullmann); National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘68: Best Director (Bergman). VHS MGM, FCT, BTV