Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Directed by Ingmar Bergman. With Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Gertrud Fridh, Georg Rydeberg. While vacationing on a remote Scandanavian island with his younger pregnant wife, an artist has an emotional breakdown while confronting his repressed desires.

Hour of the Wolf (Swedish: Vargtimmen, lit. 'The Wolf Hour') is a 1968 Swedish surrealist–psychological horror–drama film, directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann.

Ingmar Bergman's "Hour of the Wolf" is the sort of highly personal film that needs to find its own audience; the average cross section of moviegoers won't like it, I suspect. It's a difficult film, and not altogether a successful one. Bergman requires a creative act of imagination from his audience, the same sort of suspension of disbelief that Disney asks the kids to make for "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."  But the adults in the audience I observed didn't seem up to the effort. They snickered and whispered and made boors of themselves.

Full movie of Hour of the Wolf

The strangest and most disturbing of the films Ingmar Bergman shot on the island of Fårö, Hour of the Wolf stars Max von Sydow as a haunted painter living in voluntary exile with his wife (Liv Ullmann). When the couple are invited to a nearby castle for dinner, things start to go

The Hour of the Wolf (original Swedish title: Vargtimmen) is Ingmar Bergman's spin on the demons that plague his fellow creative artists. Max von Sydow plays a painter who, while spending a summer in seclusion with his pregnant wife Liv Ullmann, is visited by bizarre and disturbing visions. Before long, Ullmann is also experiencing her husband's hallucinations; one of these, an old, faceless woman, advises Ullmann to read Von Sydow's diary. Doing so, Ullmann discovers that her husband has been cheating on her with Ingrid Thulin. In the subsequent domestic squabble, Von Sydow shoots and wounds his wife. The artist's punishment for this behavior is to have his lover, now dead, spring back to life and humiliate him in full view of Ullmann. Hour of the Wolf has something to say about the dangers of artists becoming too self-centered and self-involved; one hopes that most artists are not as thoroughly punished (or punishable) as Max Von Sydow.

An artist shares his most painful memories with his wife during a long night on an isolated island.

An artist in crisis is haunted by nightmares from the past in Ingmar Bergman's only horror film, which takes place on a windy island. During "the hour of the wolf" - between midnight and dawn - he tells his wife about his most painful memories.

“Now you are yourself, but not yourself; an ideal state for a meeting between lovers.”