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"Hour of the Wolf" by Ingmar Bergman

published www.filmedvd.it

Bergman's films has always been steeped in symbolism. Even in its most classic works from the narrative, often hidden metaphors, symbols, illusions hidden. Just think of "Cries and Whispers," "Wild Strawberries," "The Virgin Spring," "Persona," "The Face" and so on.

"Hour of the Wolf" however, is probably his film more cryptic, almost surrealistic, not only in photography and style that you hang up clearly to the German, but his approach to the story, the story, the characters.
Johan is an artist tormented by nightmares, who lives two lives almost at the same time, the real one who sees her husband of Alma, a young woman who desperately tries to get close to her husband, and that inreale populated by fantastic creatures that slowly destroys his mind and which force him to come to terms with the ghosts of the past. Demons and ghosts that actually we never see in their "real" appearance. Johan describes them to his wife, after being drawn, but when we meet them seem to come out of a Bunuel films, with their air of bourgeois disgusting and nauseating, fake and diabolically insightful.
And here it is the surrealism of the film. The deranged mind of Johan, which is the castle in which he and his wife are invited to dinner and his nightmares, his demons, or the inhabitants of the castle.
E 'meaningful punch line delivered by Von Sydow: "Thanks to you I have reached the limit. The mirror is broken but the pieces reflect what?" Thanks to those nightmares, Johan has reached the end of his obsessions, has peaked, destroying himself, his life, his mind. But something has remained among the shards of the mirror. Those fragments of memories, love and peace that sometimes returns to the surface, but for a short time, soon crushed by the tortures inflicted by his demons.

"Hour of the Wolf" is a film that has nothing of real and here are the interesting titles that transmitters on top of the usual white on black background, you hear the voices off the REAL director who prepares the the opening scene with Liv Ullmann. Almost as if to remind us that what we are witnessing is a movie, nothing more than a movie (something like he did with his previous work "Person"). This is an unusual film in the filmography of the Swedish director, an autobiographical film and definitely haunted, consisting of tests actorial beautiful, a slow pace and deliberately unnerving with the latter that never go out, and sometimes jaw-dropping shots.

The note on the DVD says "the only horror films of Ingmar Bergman." In fact, "Hour of the Wolf" is not a real horror film, but if we really wanted more of a catalog you can call it noir. Not intended as a noir Bogart, but as a journey into the darkness of the human mind. A film at times difficle for his enigmatic and madness, but that is in effect a parent of some modern cinema, David Lynch to everyone.