“Hour of the Wolf” (1968)

Hour of the Wolf

Grade: B+

An underrated and overlooked companion piece to Persona, Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf is another psychological mind-bender, albeit a tad more difficult and impenetrable than his previous work. A few more notes on Hour of the Wolf:

Directing:

Fresh off the artistic success of Persona, Bergman takes his experimental tendencies even further with Hour of the Wolf (the Amnesiac to his Kid A, if you will). Once again setting his story in a desolate location far from the modern world, and once again utilizing the stark black-and-white cinematography of longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist, Hour of the Wolf is a minimalist anti-thriller that gradually grows in paranoia.

The film takes influence from German expressionism and Gothic horror, while also basking in avant-garde minimalism. This is Persona Part 2, in a sense — a dark exploration into the deepest recesses of a tormented artist’s mind, replete with dreams, flashbacks and ghosts and demons who may or may not be real. Hour of the Wolf features some of Bergman’s most memorable/terrifying sequences, but the film somewhat lacks the stream-of-consciousness surrealism necessary to make such a trip linger in our subconscious.

Acting:

Bergman regulars Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullman star as Johan and Alma Borg, a tortured writer and his tortured wife, respectively. The pair does an excellent job delivering Bergman’s existential intellectual monologues with pure conviction — we never once doubt the potency of what they’re getting at, even if we struggle to comprehend exactly what they’re trying to say. As usual with Bergman’s actors, their faces convey more emotion than words ever could, and each silent close-up contains layers of subtlety.

Writing:

The storyline of Hour of the Wolf — or lack thereof — is hard to nail down: the character of Johan might be going crazy from isolation, insomnia, drunkenness, lost love, murderous guilty conscience, crisis of identity, you name it. Along the way, Bergman vaguely flirts with framing devices that break the fourth wall. What’s really going on is left quite unclear. But whereas Persona was a masterpiece of subverting traditional cinematic expectations, Hour of the Wolf is sometimes too obscure for its own good. If the deepest recesses of a tormented artist’s mind are so infinite, then how come our hands come up empty whenever we reach in and try to grasp something?

Music:

The modernist score by Lars Johan Werle (who also scored Persona) only appears in sporadic stabs, mostly in the film’s hallucinatory second half. Hour of the Wolf is serious about its minimalism, and so the music doesn’t play a crucial role at all.

Ending (SPOILERS):

The film’s final 30 minutes are where things start to get interesting. All the demons come out to play, including a vampire, a lady with no face and a corpse that comes back to life to humiliate its former lover (I wouldn’t be surprised if this sequence had a direct influence on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining). It’s one visual nightmare after another, and the ending makes Hour of the Wolf completely worthwhile — some of Bergman’s most gloriously fucked-up imagery.

But to pin an explanation on what it all means would be an exercise in futility. Hour of the Wolf has something to do with the nature of art, the toxic dependency of humanity and the depressive isolation of existence. It’s just as abstract and avant-garde as Persona, but trying to decipher its meaning is ultimately not as fun.

“It’s the hour at which most people die and most children are born. It’s now that the nightmare comes to us.” – Johan Borg

Why Hour of the Wolf gets a B+:

Hour of the Wolf is Ingmar Bergman at his most experimental and indecipherable. The film features some of his most harrowing and hallucinatory imagery, but it’s also an unintentional parody of self-serious impenetrable European art films. Still, it’s worth watching to see a great director delving so deep into his subconscious, even if the overall message remains too obscure for its own good.

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