Hour of the Wolf

As  a teenager I read a short story -- I don't recall its title or author -- about a man invited by local aristocrats to join them in a fox hunt, only to discover too late that he was the fox.  Similarly, in Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (1968), the sensitive artist Johan is invited to the castle to dine with the upper classes, only to discover that he is the dinner.

Maybe.  In Bergman's film, the line between reality and psychotic hallucination is very fine.

The film starts in typical Bergman-esque fashion with Johan and his pregnant wife Alma being delivered by boat for the summer, in flat light, black and white cinematography, on an isolated Swedish island.  Johan is a celebrated artist who, as it develops, trails something of a history of controversy and sexual scandal behind him.  His wife is calm, loving, and conspicuously normal.

Johan has trouble sleeping, and is afraid of the dark.  He spends his days with his easel and paints, wandering the island and preparing canvases.  He returns to Alma with frightening stories of people he has met.  Or has imagined.  Grotesque people:  the Birdman, the Insects, the Meat-Eaters, the Schoolmaster and the Lady With a Hat.   Alma becomes nervous.

To this point, I had assumed that the couple had this small island to themselves.  But then a finely-dressed, older woman suddenly appears to Alma, outside their cottage, offering kind but quixotic warnings about Johan, telling her that Johan hides his diary under the bed, and suggesting that Alma read it.  Don't be afraid, she tells Alma.  You can touch me.

And then she's gone.

Reading the diary does nothing to ease Alma's worries.  Johan has had visits -- real or imagined -- from his former lover, Veronica Volger.  He has received an invitation for the couple to visit a baron in his nearby castle.  The diary continues.  Johan describes -- the film shows -- how he has murdered a pre-teen boy in a bathing suit who came near him while he was fishing, and who, in the midst of a struggle, had taken a bite out of him.  Johan crushed the boy's head repeatedly with a rock and hurled his body into the sea.

The couple go for dinner to the castle, where the guests appear to be the embodiment of the creatures who appeared in Johan's diary.  They are either caricatures of decadent nobility, or bizarre creatures with vicious senses of humor.  Johan and Alma eventually become frightened and leave.

Alma sits up with Johan at night, because he is afraid to sleep and keeps lighting matches.  He tells her that the hour before dawn is the "hour of the wolf"

It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are more real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful.

Johan has his nightmares.  He has his demons.

Eventually, Alma tells her husband she has read his diary, and asks him about his apparent continuing relationship with Veronica.  They argue, and Johan finally fires three shots at her and runs off to the castle, obsessed with seeing Veronica again. 

Weirdness ensues.  Horrible, degrading, frightening, and humiliating weirdness.

Alma, it turns out, was only slightly wounded by the gunshots.  She makes her way toward the castle, only to find Johan outside, being attacked by the guests who, quite possibly, were vampires.  

Back in the cottage, she muses before the camera, wondering -- as she had before -- whether couples become so much alike over time that they can read each other's minds.  Is that why she could see demons that existed only for Johan, hallucinations of his imagination?  Or were they real?

I asked myself, were even the castle and the baron real?  Or was the lengthy and elaborate dinner in the castle a joint hallucination of the couple?  And if was all only a joint hallucination -- where is Johan now?

Bergman probably would say, "Hey, don't ask me!  I'm just telling you a story."