Hour of the Wolf

  • Sweden Vargtimmen
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Haunted by demons past and present, artist Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) fights a losing battle to retain his sanity and maintain his artistic prowess. His wife Alma (Liv Ullmann), desperate to help him, finds herself starting to share his hallucinations. But as Johan's mind continues to unravel, Alma is forced to choose between her love and her life. (official distributor synopsis)

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Reviews (4)

DaViD´82 

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English Horror! And more psycho than Psycho itself. Ullmann and Sydow excel in front of the camera and Nykvist behind it. If it weren't for the unnecessarily exaggerated interpretive complexity, it would be perfect. ()

Marigold 

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English The theme of madness tapped on the outside and in broader contexts, for example in a film like Through a Glass Darkly, turns into a fall into the darkness of the human soul, a genre-free story about one madness. The narrative framework is based on an uncomplicated "according to the painter's diary", whilst the second narrator is the painter's wife... and since one of the film's central motifs is the mental and physical resemblance to longtime partners, the viewer finds himself listening to unreliable narrators. And they really sweep away the viewer. What is reality and what is a sick dream cannot be determined well enough, because there is no one to look to for a fixed horizon. One drastic outpouring follows the other, the sound squeaks and tears the ears. Bergman fires from all angles, the biggest caliber is the totally expressive visuals and the corrosive audio track. Hour of the Wolf is nothing more than a bizarre attempt to give the viewer the impression of losing one's own horizon of perception. Where is the frontier of reality, and does the nightmare begin? It is useless to look for any depth of meaning in this film; it is an existential horror that has no plot and that is based on a polished form, a constant pictorial bliss of the battered mind of a painter and his wife. No art for the sake of art, but in no way a film for idiots. Rather an aesthetically radical fit of imagery and a rather inseparable and unresolved film for Bergman. But he got me like a pack of wolves in a white wasteland. ()

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novoten 

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English A rather abrasive and even painful story that is the strongest in gazes into the camera, in doubts, and in a tale of two people. They are a living example of the theory mentioned several times, confirmed, and questioned, that of couples become more similar the more time they spend together. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there and towards the end it fragments into scenes from black nightmares like something cut out of Persona. This is where the previous psychological depth ends for me and the rest of the film fades into images that I have seen from Ingmar Bergman elsewhere, and better. ()

lamps 

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English Unlike Persona, this is perhaps an unnecessarily vague statement of unambiguous motives with Bergman again furiously displaying his imaginative passion in a small space. A disturbing and fanciful yet somehow morbidly true tale of mental anguish and loving and fumbling, which nine out of ten engaged couples should be required to watch before getting married in order to learn about the broader nature of marriage. This is despite the fact that Hour of the Wolf is more an artistic horror fable than Bergman's typical, pure-blooded intellectualism. Either way, it retains its formal power and message almost fully. 75% ()

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