L'Heure du loup

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. (01/12/2008)

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. (28/11/2008)

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% (16/02/2016)