i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Dark, surreal, and not for everybody. What starts out with an artist's wife (Liv Ullman) talking to the camera about the disappearance of her husband (Max von Sydow), transitions to flashbacks about their life on an island, and his increasing angst and depression. The scenes that director Ingmar Bergman gives us from the middle of the movie on, after the intertitle 'Vargtimmen', are bizarre and nightmarish. The fact that they're subject to interpretation makes it interesting, but be forewarned, there is a brooding heaviness to the film, and in crawling through the artist's mind, the images are sometimes disturbing.Whether the scenes are nightmares, hallucinations, or insanity, it's clear that the man has many demons - beatings from childhood, forbidden desires, and constantly being misunderstood or compartmentalized as an artist. With the exception of his wife, who is a stabilizing force, the others on the island seem like demons incarnate. The scenes where he's in the mansion, at a dinner party and later trying to meet an old lover (Ingrid Thulin), feel claustrophobic and warped. We feel his social awkwardness, the outrage of critics commenting on his work, and the violation of women trying to possess a piece of him via sex or hanging a painting of his on the wall. The reduction of it all, and all while smirking or laughing at him. We feel for him as he's been silent but then exclaims "I call myself an artist for lack of a better name. In my creative work there is nothing implicit except compulsion. Through no fault of mine, I've been pointed out as something quite extraordinary, a calf with five legs, a monster. I have never fought to attain that position and I shall not fight to keep it."My interpretation, for whatever it's worth, is that husband and wife are all alone on the island, and that all of the other characters in the movie are memories or demons haunting his troubled mind. (and in the case of the woman who magically knows where his diary is kept, the intuition in his wife's mind). Both times when asked to the mansion he doesn't even reply, which could be because his perspective is to feel voiceless and powerless in society, or it could be because it's an inner dialogue. Perhaps this view is a little extreme and 'reality' is shown in the first half (before the intertitle), through the artist's perspective (especially at the party), but I have to believe the visions of the second half are all in his mind, and often symbolic. For example, we're not actually seeing the murder of a child in that oh-so-disturbing scene, we're seeing him attempt to stifle his latent homosexual desires. The wife seems to think they're close, and yet, he has a secret world revealed in his diary, and is a man ultimately tortured and alone. His insomnia has him up in the wee hours of the night, during the "hour of the wolf", which legend says is "when most people die, when most children are born. Now is when nightmares come to us. And if we are awake, we're afraid." He's slipping into insanity, thus losing himself, and his wife also is in danger of losing her mind, as she wonders whether it's true that "a woman who lives a long time with a man, eventually winds up being like that man." I suppose therein lies further horror.The film has strong performances from Max von Sydow, who really puts himself out there for the film, as well as Liv Ullman, who expresses such fear with her eyes. The legend of vargtimmen feels like an homage to the slightly different legend that director Victor Sjöström referred to in "The Phantom Carriage" (1921), which was one of Bergman's favorite films. Bergman is artistic in this film, with interesting shots, camera angles, and the use of high contrast to amplify the dreamlike feel to his scenes. It seems he's speaking some of his own truth as an artist here. The film may remind some of 1965's "Persona" in its themes of mental health and because all may not be as it seems, but weirdly enough it also reminded me of 1964's "All These Women". That film is the polar opposite in its tone (comedy/light vs horror/dark), but also expresses the difficulty of an artist amidst everything surrounding him (though that film is also external vs internal, if that makes sense). This film is far better, but also a bit of an extreme, and Bergman borders a bit on pretentiousness at times here. That may be a controversial view, but regardless, the film is just a bit too dark for me to give a higher review score, or to recommend without reservations.

"The Hour of the Wolf" refers to that particular moment between night and day where sleep is at its deepest, where most dreams -consequently nightmares- gets the realest feeling, where most people die and are born, where we're at the most fragile and vulnerable state. In the end, it is such a fascinating accumulation of superlatives of creepy undertones, it would've been impossible for an explorer of the human condition like Ingmar Bergman not to tackle it.And to illustrate the eeriness of the titular notion, Bergman translates it into a mysterious pathology that took possession of a tortured artist's soul; a painter named Johan Borg and played by Max Von Sydow. The film is based on the fictional notes taken before his death (or disappearance?) and revealed in front of the camera by his widow (?) Alma, played by Liv Ullman. The two actors star again in a Bergmanian film in the same year than "Shame", Bergman's anti-war pamphlet but this is one more obscure and puzzling film, even by Bergman's standards.In fact, the film made me realize that despite the heavy psychological material carried by most Bergman movies, they were pretty much straight-forward about their subject and at the end, it was always a part of our human condition that revealed to us, mirrored by our relationship with time, with God, with the others. It's like each Bergman's movie played like a piece of puzzle that would constitute a magnificent and intelligent study of the human soul. But "The Hour of the Wolf" is one of these pieces of the puzzle you don't know where to put.This is not to separate the film from Bergman's other works, it's his first and –I guess- only take on supernatural and surrealistic material, and the result is aesthetically nightmarish and conveys well the horror inhabiting Johan's soul, but Bergman, as inaccessible as he is, always found a way to guide us to his characters, even at the price of a second viewing. I wanted to understand what was going into Johan's mind, was that sickness? Hallucinations? In a way, Alma mirrors these very feelings and like her, we want to know more about him.Some shadows of answers come when she sneaks into his diary, the reading episodes provide the first hints: one creepy dream involving a kid trying to kill him and an idyll with a girl named Vogler and played by Ingrid Thullin. Shot in high contrast and with a pretty furious editing, the kid's killing and drowning is one of the most disturbing sequences I've ever seen, my guess is that it supposed to evoke the repression of some childhood episodes, and maybe the child Johan kills is himself, the clue comes from his revelation of a childhood trauma later to Alma.The Vogler episode is echoed during a dinner where the couple meets a group of rich and eccentric slobs to the limits of perversity bourgeois (lead by Erland Josephson). They all seem to know about Johans' affair. They're obnoxious, uneducated, aggressive, one of the lady literally jumps at Johans, Josephson's wife implies that they try to take him from his wife, they're the closest players to the antagonists, and leave us a sentiment of total discomfort, like these creepy nightmares where we don't know where we are but can't wait to get the hell out.I guess "The Hour of the Wolf" encapsulates this feeling of continuous entrapment and impossibility to escape from a situation without getting through it, it's probably these repressed feelings that come back to the surface to better torture us. Maybe it's a surrealistic definition of guilt, guilt from one man's weakness. Which might explain that Johan decided to isolate himself from the world in the remote house leaving a peaceful and dull life with Alma, while he's lived quite a torturous and much more cinematically appealing life? And maybe the third act is the price he finally paid by not being totally sincere with his wife. It's made of a whole long sequence where they search Max in the forest, while he's in the castle and must play some twisted and pervert games, nudity, make-up, crows, all the most unsettling archetypes of nightmares are used … and at the end, nothing but absence, absence of Max, of explanations … "The Hour of the Wolf" leaves many interrogations, and so does the film. Right now, I'm still having this 'what the hell did I see?' expression I had when it ended.I certainly wouldn't be a fan of Bergman if I had seen this first, but because I'm a fan, I try to see the film with more magnanimous eyes. I can accept the absence of definite answers and the way Bergman drowns his work into his own creativity, my take is that Bergman invites us to embrace these moments where we're directly haunted by our own demons, where we must face the true facet of our personality, when the nightmare gets its realest feeling, perhaps the closest moment in life is when it looks like a nightmare."The Hour of the Wolf" is certainly the closest Bergman's film to a nightmare and I wonder if the deliberate noises he made at the beginning of the film were made to reassure us that we were only watching a film, as to insist that no matter how creepy this stuff is, it's still the product of one's imagination. I guess I prefer Bergman when he approaches our reality, but even the way we handle our reality is conditioned by our subconscious, and all the feelings we try to repress. Maybe this is "The Hour of the Wolf", this moment where for some reason; we have good reasons to act irrational.But I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a first Bergman's film.

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.

Liv relates story of her life with Max through flashbacks. Max, a disturbed artist, relates profound stories through flashbacks within flashbacks, or they may just be nightmares or hallucinations, or Bergman may have spliced in footage from the wrong film. The couple goes to a party but are too depressed to have a good time. They don't sleep for weeks but try to bore each other to sleep through dull stories and philosophical rants. Strange characters randomly pop in and out, including a boy who bites, a man who walks up walls, and a woman who removes her face and soaks her eyeballs in water. Any coherence in the narrative is purely unintentional on Bergman's part.