Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Richard Chatten Ingmar Bergman had had a penchant for short injections of fantasy into his films as far back as the chiaroscuro dream sequences of his forties 'neo-realist' dramas, although by the time of 'Vargtimmen' the hero (Max von Sydow) has moved up market and is now an artist in retreat from the world on a remote island who happens to have a neighbour - played by Erland Josephson - who lives in a castle occupied by a court of dinner-jacketed idlers.Based - like 'The Blair Witch Project' - on the diary of an individual who then disappeared without trace, relaxed 60's censorship permitted more explicit images than the vaguely Freudian nature of Bergman's earlier fantasies, like Ingrid Thulin baring herself for the camera while cackling fiendishly, and one of Bergman's sun-bleached nightmares in which Sydow bashes in the head of a young lad in speedos. Elsewhere there are creepy moments as when Josephson is depicted walking up a wall and Naima Wifstrand peels off her face and drops her eyeball into a wine glass; while Sydow prowls about at night like Vincent Price in one of Roger Corman's Poe adaptations - only shot by Sven Nykvist in glacial black & white rather than the hot Pathecolor hues of Floyd Crosby.

LoneWolfArcher Max von Sydow is amazing as always. And Liv Ullman turns in a brilliant performance. But Ingmar Bergman is the real star of this film. His direction is top notch.The premise, a couple (wife pregnant) come to an island. He to paint. He has a past that haunts him. Troubled childhood, affair with a married woman, and an accidental, self-defense killing of a young boy.But the real issue at hand is his wife Alma's jealousy. As she becomes aware of his past affair, she begins to imagine him pulling farther and farther away. Bergman does a masterful job of making us believe that Johan is having illusions, but really the illusions are all Alma's.He tries to shoot her, I believe in self-defense. My belief for what became of Johan is that Alma killed him and ate him. She invented the "demons" and Johan's "insanity" as a way of playing this off.I believe this is one of the conclusion's Bergman was going for. The original script title was "The Cannibals". We are made to believe the "demons" ate Johan. But the demons never really existed, only Johan and Alma did. The only logical conclusion is that Alma's jealousy over Veronica drove her to the actions she took.Very well done film. And even if my theory is wrong, it is a reasonable conclusion for a viewer to come to. Consider that Alma even talks to us as if we are there, yet there is really no one there for her to talk to.I highly recommend this film.

BillKendich89 A movie is supposed to be allegorical and fictitious to a degree, in fact that's the idea, but with Hour of The Wolf the viewer is utterly subjected to the dissociation of a plot that is permeated with surrealism beyond any meaningful deliverance of ideas and message. It is quite a tricky task to successfully capture the essence of subliminal intentions and convey them to the audience in a comprehensive and meaningful way, be it dubious or not. Yet there are some artists who succeed at it, one being David Lynch. That is not to say that I'm tossing this film into the shredder, there certainly are people who'd appreciate it more than I did. It perhaps is not my cup of coffee, because, for one thing, I didn't get anything out of it. I scrounged a VCR tape of the film off a friend a long time ago, and I'm glad that I did. At least I saved those few bucks for something else I could actually enjoy, like bag of noodles.

kenjha 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.