Hour of the Wolf [reviewed by Lackey]

aka Vargtimmen
87 min., 1968
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Language: Swedish (English subtitles available)
My rating:
IMDB • Netflix

I don’t get it.

* * *

Premise

Alma Borg tells the story of her husband Johan and his relationship with the eccentric residents of the remote island where they once lived–and the surreal events which led to his disappearance.

Review

Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf is usually typed as a horror movie, but it’s definitely not your average fright flick.

It’s a movie that follows a set of conventions that are definitely, well, unconventional. I like the basic idea of the story–I’ll never get sick of the neurotic/mad artist trope–but in presentation, Hour of the Wolf is too cool and bloodless to be truly effective. (There’s some evidence that Bergman deliberately used techniques to distance the audience from the characters and events, apparently because he didn’t want people to think that Hour of the Wolf was autobiographical.)

There are some fine performances, particularly by Max von Sydow (looking almost impossibly young) as Johan, Liv Ullmann as Alma and Erland Josephson as the sinister Baron von Merkens, but my issue is that the actors don’t really seem to relate or respond to each other well. This isn’t an issue of mere chemistry or rapport–rather, if this were a modern movie, I’d think each actor filmed his or her scenes alone against a green screen and then everything was composited together later. It doesn’t help that the characters don’t so much converse with each other as deliver monologues at each other.

It turns out that the other inhabitants of the island are apparently manifestations of Johan’s feelings of shame or guilt or whatever, which explains why they act oddly–they’re not really characters, they’re anthropomorphized symbols who behave symbolically. Not all that different from Santa Sangre, except that at least in Santa Sangre it was pretty obvious that I looking at symbols instead of characters. With Hour of the Wolf, I thought I was looking at characters and didn’t realize I was looking at symbols until I read the Wikipedia article and found sentences like this one:

In one scene, [Johan] recounts to his wife meeting a small boy tanning himself on a rock. As the boy approached Johan, he “realized” it was a demon representing homosexuality (and sexual experimentation in his youth)…

Except that’s not what I took away from that at all! The scene is definitely filmed in a “this-is-not-really-happening” sort of way, so I figured it might not be strictly per se real. And while I’m not a huge fan of being spoon-fed things I can figure out on my own, not only is it not stated the child represents that, as far as I can tell it even isn’t implied. Maybe it’s a ’60s thing or a Swedish thing or an Ingmar Bergman (this is the only Bergman film I’ve ever seen, so I don’t know how it fits into the larger context of his body of work) thing, but I don’t look at an 8-year-old boy in a Speedo and immediately think, “Ah, that represents homosexual experimentation” or whatever.

And I feel bad that I don’t get the movie because it’s got a lot to recommend it. I already mentioned the performances. When the characters are behaving like people instead of symbols there’s some wonderful moments (my favorite is when Johan is trying to eat his food in peace while Alma goes over the grocery bill line by line to prove to him where the money’s going–even insisting that he double-check her math–when it’s incredibly clear he’s just not interested). Bergman has fantastic command of the black-and-white palette, the photography is atmospheric and the locations are simply stunning. And the final half hour of the film is remarkably creepy and surreal.

Despite my intellectual pretensions and my affinity for what you might term “art horror” (movies like Amer and Funny Games), I don’t consider myself a cineaste or cinephile or whatever–I’m just a guy who doesn’t know much about art but know what he likes. I think there’s a fairly good chance that Hour of the Wolf is probably a good or even very good movie, and I simply just don’t get it.

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• Scream of the Banshee [reviewed by Lackey]
  Zero stars: Someone's asleep at the wheel.
• Santa Claws [reviewed by the Drudgeon]
  Zero stars: They didn’t even try so neither will I!