It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Ingmar Bergman had had a penchant for short injections of fantasy into his films as far back as the chiaroscuro dream sequences of his forties 'neo-realist' dramas, although by the time of 'Vargtimmen' the hero (Max von Sydow) has moved up market and is now an artist in retreat from the world on a remote island who happens to have a neighbour - played by Erland Josephson - who lives in a castle occupied by a court of dinner-jacketed idlers.Based - like 'The Blair Witch Project' - on the diary of an individual who then disappeared without trace, relaxed 60's censorship permitted more explicit images than the vaguely Freudian nature of Bergman's earlier fantasies, like Ingrid Thulin baring herself for the camera while cackling fiendishly, and one of Bergman's sun-bleached nightmares in which Sydow bashes in the head of a young lad in speedos. Elsewhere there are creepy moments as when Josephson is depicted walking up a wall and Naima Wifstrand peels off her face and drops her eyeball into a wine glass; while Sydow prowls about at night like Vincent Price in one of Roger Corman's Poe adaptations - only shot by Sven Nykvist in glacial black & white rather than the hot Pathecolor hues of Floyd Crosby.

A movie is supposed to be allegorical and fictitious to a degree, in fact that's the idea, but with Hour of The Wolf the viewer is utterly subjected to the dissociation of a plot that is permeated with surrealism beyond any meaningful deliverance of ideas and message. It is quite a tricky task to successfully capture the essence of subliminal intentions and convey them to the audience in a comprehensive and meaningful way, be it dubious or not. Yet there are some artists who succeed at it, one being David Lynch. That is not to say that I'm tossing this film into the shredder, there certainly are people who'd appreciate it more than I did. It perhaps is not my cup of coffee, because, for one thing, I didn't get anything out of it. I scrounged a VCR tape of the film off a friend a long time ago, and I'm glad that I did. At least I saved those few bucks for something else I could actually enjoy, like bag of noodles.

Bergman made "Hour of the Wolf" in 1968 and it's one of his most personal films. It also verges on a parody of what we expect a Bergman film to be, being a typically dark and forbidding study of the artist destroyed by his own demons. Moving between a conventional horror film and a wholly individualistic study of madness it's not in the front rank of Bergman pictures yet it is still quite remarkable and is head and shoulders above anything a lesser director might have turned out. As the artist losing his sanity and the wife barely able to cope both Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann are superb while the luminous black and white cinematography is by Bergman regular Sven Nykvist.

This film plays on all the tensioned strings of love as the most powerful emotion--the most direct segue to insanity. Love is something we want to happen selfishly, but by its very nature requires a mutual, balanced, and undivided emotion. The madness that ensues in these characters is clearly tied to the various imbalances that occur: unrequited love, partial love, projections of the desired state of of the loved one upon the loved one, incompatibility torturing those who lust for love, sexual lust, and most of all...the permanent scar left upon those who loved truly, and lost. The sheer all-encompassing nature of this film, the fact that it touches on the madness behind so many forms of love is a testament to its concise power. Interestingly--unlike most films and art films which attempt only to share a story of the human experience or to evoke with us an emotion--Hour of the Wolf is also very much a practical film, because above all, it is a warning.