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....
Review of Hour of the Wolf
