Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Author: Brett Gallman
Submitted by: Brett Gallman   Date : 2015-10-31 07:52
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Written and Directed by: Ingmar Bergman

Starring: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann and Gertrud Fridh




Reviewed by: Brett Gallman





“The old ones called it 'the hour of the wolf'. It is the hour when the most people die, and the most are born. At this time, nightmares come to us. And when we awake, we are afraid."


Hour of the Wolf is often cited as Ingmar Bergman’s lone horror film, which isn’t an altogether incorrect distinction. However, it’s perhaps more accurate to call it a despairing love story that represents one of the director’s most nakedly personal films; hatched during the same existential crisis that resulted in Persona, it is similarly about fractured personalities. This time, though, it’s split between a pair of lovers, and the horror derives from the two being wedged further apart as one descends into insanity.

Bergman regulars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman (who was carrying Bergman’s child at the time) play Johan and Alma, a husband and wife who retreated to the countryside. The former is an artist who disappeared, and the latter recounts the days leading up to his disappearance. During their sabbatical, Johan’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic and withdrawn; he claims he is haunted by demons that appear to him in the form of slightly sinister aristocratic oddballs that live on the other side of the island.



This might be Bergman’s sole horror effort, but Hour of the Wolf feels very similar to most of his films. There’s a similarly airless, detached quality that you’ll find in his other works; despite being considered one of his most personal films, there’s still a very impersonal quality to the reserved precision. Even in his films that aren’t strictly horror, Bergman’s affinity for building a fatalistic sense of suspense is evident, and similar techniques are on display here: there’s a dry, isolated setting where the wind rustles more than it howls, and many of the exchanges between the protagonists center on Johan’s creeping paranoia and odd behavior.


The sparse events and plot points also revolve around this, as the couple is sometimes visited by the strangers; Johan refers to them as being a bird-man, insects, meat-eaters, a schoolmaster, and even an old lady whose face will fall off if her hat is removed. One wonders if Johan has imagined all of this and if they represent some kind of repressed memories that continue to haunt him; however, their actual, physical presence and interactions with Alma cast doubt. They even invite the couple to a dinner party one night, and it’s here we can see the cracks begin to form in Johan’s mind, as his insecurities surrounding his own work come to the forefront. Like many of Bergman’s protagonists, Johan is having a crisis in faith, but it isn’t in God; instead, it’s in art itself, as he insists that his attempts to comfort himself are often met with the realization that art isn’t even necessary in the world.

These are transparent stand-ins for Bergman’s own fears, of course, and, on one level, this is what Hour of the Wolf is about: an introspection that reflects its director’s existential agonies. There’s a moment in the film when Johan insists that the mirror has been shattered, and he wonders what the splinters reflect; Hour of the Wolf itself is one of the splinters from Bergman’s own shattered psyche, and it reflects his overwhelming desire to confirm Art. The film is loaded with artifice, from the opening titles that feature Bergman’s crew rummaging in the background as they take his directions, to the reappearance of the film’s title to signify the beginning of the third act. These and other intrusions act as distancing, almost Brechtian reminders that what we’re seeing is a work of art. It’s almost ironic that the film is framed by the insistence that the director has received this information from both Johan’s journal and Alma’s testimonial, a technique that foreshadows the faux verite techniques intended to heighten reality. In this case, however, Bergman does all he can to subvert that with a constantly heightened sense of unreality, right down to the peeling layers of the narration.

A closer examination of this reveals the hidden depths and the actual story rumbling beneath the surface of Hour of the Wolf; as it turns out, it’s not really about Johan at all. Rather, it’s about Alma’s attempt to come to terms with both her lover’s insanity and even his possible infidelity (one of the strangers is a woman from Johan’s past). Ullman gives an unbelievably heartbreaking turn in the film, her perpetually welled-up eyes betraying an inner desperation to cling to her husband and understand him; as always, Bergman’s camera loves her face, with her direct addresses acting as more of a confessional. She confides in us everything that must have been on her mind when she acted as the priest during Johan’s own confessionals. While it seems like their relationship is becoming more frayed, Johan relates his most haunting memories; one involves a childhood punishment that had his parents lock him up in a closet, and the other is a disturbing scene that flashbacks to earlier in the summer when he had an encounter with a young boy that drives him to a curious rage (one wonders if the boy’s somewhat sexual posturing awakened a sexual paranoia in Johan that also led him to believe that one of his demonic demons may also be homosexual).

All of this builds to film’s staggering climax, and indeed it’s the only sequence that you might consider to be pure horror. Bergman again piles up artifice as he explores Johan’s “hour of the wolf,” here defined as the hour when the sleepless are haunted by “their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are at their most powerful.” Johan’s fears are artfully literalized when he returns to the mansion to confront those who have haunted him for the entire film. It’s an appropriately nightmarish sequence that sees Bergman essentially giving us a tour through the horror genre, as he cribs on recognizable iconography. He erects a haunted mansion built on the sharp angles and deep shadows of German Expressionism and fills it with vaguely familiar sights: one of the sycophants inside (George Rydeberg) resembles Lugosi’s Dracula, while Johan’s lust for his mistress has taken on Poe-levels of obsession when he attempts an act of necrophilia with her corpse (after being dolled up to resemble a woman, an act that may crystallize his underlying fears of his lack of masculinity). All the while, his bourgeois audience looks on in mockery, condemning him to a terrifying and lonely moment of soul searching.

Or is he alone? That’s the big question eventually raised by Hour of the Wolf, and the film ends with Alma wondering if he loved Johan too much or not enough, a query that trails off abruptly as the camera stops rolling (Bergman’s final artistic intrusion). This begs a sort of ambiguity, but it’s easy to argue that Alma’s love is pure and on pitch; she frequently wonders in the film if she and Johan will ever be an old couple who grow so closely together that they begin to resemble each other, and one can plainly see that she’s held up her end of the deal. After all, she has so accurately depicted his dark night of the soul without even being there (recall that the entire film is technically relayed from her remembrance, so she is literally narrating her husband’s internal nervous breakdown). The tragedy is that Johan, too blinded by a need for external acceptance, fails to see this; if the film is a reflection of Bergman’s own mindset at the time, one can read it as his love letter to Ullman herself (or perhaps even an apology since, like Alma, she certainly had to put up with her lover’s neurosis). It’s a confirmation of the lover’s place as a rightful muse, as Alma bears the brunt of the film’s tragedy.

Hour of the Wolf is a work of haunting sublimity whose minimalist aesthetic belies its staggering thematic depth. It is perhaps a clunky film in a conventional sense--much of the film’s conflict is relayed by conversations, and it’s actually rather difficult to wrangle down the propulsion. Watching it unfold might not come without a certain sense of trepidation because you sometimes feel like you’re barely treading Bergman’s waters, and they are sometimes choppy and almost always abstract in this case. In the end, he pulls you through with a story that’s perhaps more sad than scary, but sadness is the aftermath of loss, and loss is accompanied by fear. Confronting one’s demons and discovering an emptiness in your own soul is a very Bergman concept that’s pushed to its horrific limits here. Hour of the Wolf can be found on DVD both in a single release and as part of a box set, with both discs containing the same content (which includes a trailer, interviews with Ullman and Erland Josephson, a featurette about the film, and a commentary with Bergman biographer Marc Gervais). You will want to make sure you track down the version with the correct aspect ratio (1.33:1), as MGM did erroneously release it in 1.66 during the initial pressing. I’d recommend the box set since Hour of the Wolf really only scratches the surface of Bergman, and, as great as it is, it is mostly regarded as one of his minor films. Yeah, he was pretty good.



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