Hour Of The Wolf

aka: Vargtimmen
Sweden 1968, 84 minutes, Black and white
Dir. Ingmar Bergman
In Swedish with English subtitles
Rating: [PG]
Genres: Foreign Cinema, Drama / Arts & Artists

Feat. Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann

Aroview: One of dir. Bergman's most troubled visions, this concerns the descent of an unstable artist (von Sydow) and his sensitive wife (Ullmann) into a stark world of insanity and hallucinations.

Reconstructing the memory of the wife, this follows sleeplessness with visions of odd encounters, climaxing with two paranoid episodes at a dinner party where aristocratic guests transform into vampires, sucking the "soul of the artist". Certainly not easy viewing, this remains an essential work from the gloomy Swede and has been seen as a companion work to the similarly experimental PERSONA.