Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Hour of the Wolf (1968) is Ingmar Bergman’s singular venture into horror: a brooding, psychological portrait of an artist’s collapse set on a remote, wind-bitten Scandinavian island. Johan Borg, an increasingly sleepless and haunted painter, and his younger, pregnant wife Alma retreat to an isolated summer cabin where Johan’s repressed desires, past passions and waking nightmares begin to surface. Alma discovers Johan’s private diary and, as she reads, the couple’s measured, clinical relationship is peeled back to reveal his remembered love for a woman named Veronica, strange visitors, and a growing sense that something inhuman prowls the hours between midnight and dawn—the “hour of the wolf.” Viewers should expect an atmospheric, slow-burning film rather than jump-scare thrills. The experience is unsettling and dreamlike: stark, often nightmarish imagery; tense, intimate performances (notably by Max von Sydow); and a pervasive ambiguity about what is real and what is imagined. Themes of insomnia, nyctophobia, artistic torment, jealousy and existential dread are explored through confessions, diary passages and haunting encounters. The island’s isolation, chilling social circle (the von Merkens and their acquaintances), and Bergman’s eerie soundscapes create a claustrophobic mood in which nightmares feel as vivid as waking life. The narrative resists tidy explanations—Johan’s breakdown culminates in his mysterious disappearance into the woods, leaving Alma (and the audience) unsure which moments were memory, fantasy, or supernatural intrusion. If you watch Hour of the Wolf, you’ll leave with a lingering sense of unease and melancholy: a poetic, nightmarish meditation on creativity, desire and the blurry boundary between inner demons and outward reality.

Actors: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Gertrud Fridh

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Runtime: 90 min

Genres: Drama, Horror

7.4 /10 7.5 /10 7.5 /10