Hour of the Wolf (1968) - film review

A painter, Johan Borg, and his young wife Alma move into a small cottage on a remote island.  Some time after their idyllic first weeks on the island, Alma notices a change in her husband.  He is disturbed by strange visions and insists that the couple stay awake during the night.  Curious to know the cause of Johan’s breakdown, Alma reads his secret diary and discovers that he had a passionate affair with another woman, Veronica Vogler, some years previously.  Could this be the key to his impending madness...?

In the mid-1960s, director Ingmar Bergman experienced a minor mental collapse, from which came the inspiration for two films – Persona (1966) and Hour of the Wolf.  Both films are concerned with mental derangement and employ a cinematic approach which, for Bergman, was daringly experimental.  Although there are many similarities between the two films, they are also remarkably different.

Whilst Persona is concerned primarily with matters of identity and ontology (themes which recur unceasingly in Bergman’s work), Hour of the Wolf is more about the relationship between an artist and his art (more specifically, how an artist can be destroyed by his art).   The former film is (after its startling surreal opening sequence)  cinematographically restrained, whereas the latter is much more stylised, possibly Bergman’s most visually spectacular film.

For Hour of the Wolf, Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist shamelessly appropriate the cinematographic technique of the German expressionist filmmakers of the 1920s – to convey vividly the impression of a mind in the process of disintegration, unable to distinguish reality from fantasy.    Hour of the Wolf is as much a Gothic horror film as it is a bold exploration of the darker side of the human psyche – and indeed it could plausibly be argued that the two things are equivalent.

The link between mental derangement and horror had its origins in German expressionist art in the first decades of the 20th century.   Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) were among the first films to tap into our deep-rooted atavistic fears (of night, beasts, spirits, sex and death), fears that lie at the heart of all our anxieties and neuroses.  Fear being a fundamental part of the human psyche, it’s not too difficult to make the connection between Gothic horror and Bergman.  Most, if not all, of Bergman’s films involve one character confronting the darker aspects of his or her psychology.   Antonius Block’s flirtation with Death in The Seventh Seal (1957) is a poetic re-interpretation of the contest between Harker and Dracula – both are metaphors for man’s eternal struggle to face up to his own inner demons and affirm his own identity.

The connections with Persona are subtle yet revealing.  In that film, Liv Ulman plays an actress named Elisabeth Vogler who cannot (or will not) speak after a nervous breakdown.  Her character is cared for by a nurse named Alma, who gradually takes on Vogler’s personality (literally absorbs her persona) as the drama unfolds.    In Hour of the wolf, Ulman plays not the artist, but the wife of the artist, a character that just happens to be named Alma.   It’s the kind of switch that occurs in a number of Bergman’s films, duality (the pairing of complementary characters) being one of his most crucial leitmotifs – but this is perhaps the most blatant and the most interesting.

As in Persona, the character Alma is drawn ineluctably into the abnormal mind state of her companion.  In Hour of the Wolf, the consequences of this are profoundly worrying, because the story is told entirely from Alma’s perspective.  We assume, when the film begins, that Alma is well-balanced and can give an accurate account of how she came to lose her husband.  At the end of the film, things are far less clear-cut.  It is apparent that Alma has been corrupted by Johan’s madness, and this causes us to question whether her account of events is accurate.  What Bergman implies is that the point-of-view crucially affects the spectator’s understanding of the story.  If this is true in fiction, then surely it is just as true in real life. There is no such thing as an objective reality. Everything is a matter of interpretation...

© James Travers 2007

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?