:
Liv Ullmann,
Max Von Sydow,
Erland Josephson,
more...
:
Ingmar Bergman
see all cast/crew...
: Not Rated
: MGM
: Drama, Foreign, Scandinavia
: 93 min.
: English, Spanish, French
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The Hour of the Wolf (original Swedish title: Vargtimmen) is Ingmar Bergman's spin on the demons that plague his fellow creative artists. Max von Sydow plays a painter who, while spending a summer in seclusion with his pregnant wife Liv Ullmann, is visited by bizarre and disturbing visions. Before long, Ullmann is also experiencing her husband's hallucinations; one of these, an old, faceless woman, advises Ullmann to read Von Sydow's diary. Doing so, Ullmann discovers that her husband has been cheating on her with Ingrid Thulin. In the subsequent domestic squabble, Von Sydow shoots and wounds his wife. The artist's punishment for this behavior is to have his lover, now dead, spring back to life and humiliate him in full view of Ullmann. Hour of the Wolf has something to say about the dangers of artists becoming too self-centered and self-involved; one hopes that most artists are not as thoroughly punished (or punishable) as Max Von Sydow. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
NOTE: MGM Home Entertainment will be releasing this correctly mastered Ingmar Bergman film on April 20.
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| In hyperanxiety, there is disintegration...
by wdrazo
October 4, 2006 - 7:50 PM PDT
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3 out of 3 members found this review helpful
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Originally called in some form "The Cannibals", Bergman softens the horror of this surreal story by having Alma (Liv Ullman), young and comely, as the soul center, the anchor in the sea of insanity. She tells us a story of herself to the interviewer, Bergman himself.
Here, a famous artist (a Vincent VanGogh doppelganger) and his wife arrive on a early summer trip on a remote Frisian island in the North Sea. There is a profile of a canine face as the boatman leaves the isle in the middle foreground. They push their belongings up the craggy hill to their placid farmhouse. Soon, he comes home from sketching the wyrde inhabitants of the island.
What can look on the surface as scheming and bored aristocrats out to get Johan Borg (Max Von Sydow) because of a scandalous affair with a wealthy and prominent woman, Veronica Vogler (the late Ingrid Thulin), or, alternately, a family so desperate for money that they plan to kill Johan so that his paintings go up in price, since they have a feted portrait of Veronica, can be something else entirely. You grasp for symbols everywhere, but do they mean something or anything?
However, the tale turns out to be an unfolding, waking dream of vampirish evil. Bergman telegraphs us that one character, Lindhorst, the Bird Man, is a Bela Lugosi stand-in. A provocative adolescent boy represents an sexual incubus. Now, with the child's bite, Borg is truly infected with the iniquity of self.
This movie owes a debt to the following or the newer films owe a debt to it:
Feillaud's The Vampires
Dreyer's Vampyr
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Dracula
L'Aventura
Rosemary's Baby
8 1/2
The Birds
Psycho
Death in Venice
The Prisoner
Bergman harkens back in this film to the selfish userers of Anton Strindberg and Max Ernst's terrors of human existence. Rent it with Fassbinder's The Year of 13 Moons. If I say anymore. . . |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.54)
70 Votes
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