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Rating: A film that can only be seen at night, with the lights off, in silence. The hour of the wolf is that period, made of endless minutes, when the darkness reaches its most consistent state, just before dawn, that stretch of time when ghosts gather, and nightmares become deeper, it is "the hour when many people die, and many children are born".
Johan Borg (Max Von Sydow) is a misanthropic artist who enjoys modest success thanks to his paintings; he decides to move to an uninhabited island with his wife Alma (Liv Ullmann) to find in that hermit's life the inspiration necessary to perform better in his work. Initially, the lives of the two spouses seem to pass quietly, but Johan Borg has always lived with the monsters that inhabit his mind, ghosts of the past, ghosts of a lost and distant love, perhaps imagined, ghosts of old traumas and denied perversions, rapes of his own soul, and these monsters will soon begin to come out of hiding, making him increasingly cold towards his wife and undermining the serenity of their marriage. Johan is afraid of the dark, spends sleepless infinite night hours, and forces Alma to do the same, the slender flames of continuously lit matches illuminate his terrified expression, and the few dialogues break a silence that envelops everything; in a notebook, he draws the delirious figures that torment him, giving them names, and he tends to keep a diary in which he records day by day his thoughts about a distorted reality, a reality where he is unable to distinguish what really exists from what appears only in the shadow of his mind (extraordinary Bergman in never showing the portraits). Over the course of the narrative, these figures will take shape and body, the facets of his soul will split into multiple characters embodying his fears, unconscious, vices, and troubles. In contrast, Alma is a pure figure, unique and not shattered into dozens of personalities, follows her husband, and cares for him, descending with him into the depths of the mind until she too sees those monsters, but all with the desire to stand by him and help him get out, her tired and sad eyes continuously watch over the depression that gnaws at Johan's soul but eventually she wonders if a woman who has lived so long with a man will end up being like him and seeing things in the same way. And this, perhaps, will also drag her into the abyss, Johan's monsters also become hers.
Based on a theatrical script written years earlier by Bergman himself (titled "The Cannibals"), "Hour of the Wolf" is one of the Swedish director's gloomiest and most surreal films, a film dominated by silence and in which the dialogues (or rather monologues) are minimized to further expand the spaces and make the atmosphere terribly unsettling; what is seen is the distorted reality, a hallucination that ends up slipping into the grotesque, a dreamlike horror in which fear and shame are mixed, all placed above the central theme of the incommunicability of both the couple and the artist, who does not recognize himself in the world around him.
Ingmar Bergman fills this work with autobiographical elements, creating in Johan Borg his own alter ego and choosing the location of the deserted island, inspired by the island of Fårö where he used to retreat to escape from the world. The fine black and white photography by Sven Nykvist accentuates the spectral tones of the film and engulfs the viewer in a closed box from which one cannot escape until the end credits roll, while Liv Ullmann will win the National Board of Review Award for Best Actress.
And David Lynch owes much to this film.
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