New Movies: Hour of the Wolf

"Sin enters by dread, but sin in turn brought dread with it," wrote Kierkegaard, describing the guilt that floods the dark night of the soul. Another Scandinavian, Ingmar Bergman, plays out that quasi-religious concept by examining one soul in the blackness just before dawn—the Hour of the Wolf, "when nightmares are most palpable,' when ghosts and demons hold sway."

On an island off the coast of Sweden live a cadaverous, obsessed painter (Max von Sydow) and his pregnant wife (Liv Ullman). The time is summer, and Von Sydow is slowly going mad. He is terrified by demons, people whom he sees and fears. One is a homosexual, another a 216-year-old woman who keeps threatening to take off her hat—and her face. Gradually infected with her husband's aberrations, Ullman looks up from her yard one day and sees the ancient crone. Soon the artist and his wife are invited to a haunted castle where the Draculalike Baron von Merkens, who owns the island, presides over assorted evil spirits —a sadist, an effeminate embezzler, and Von Sydow's naked ex-mistress (Ingrid Thulin), who seduces him, then ridicules him before the others. The castle takes on the air of a Dadaesque painting: a man walks the ceiling and the walls, like a fly; the old lady peels off her face like a mask, then drops her eyes in a wineglass. A malignant bird pecks away at Von Sydow as if he were Prometheus chained.

Shattered Shards. As he traces the history of Von Sydow's agonies, Bergman draws almost too straight a line: as a boy, the painter was chastised by his parents, locked in a dark closet, then caned repeatedly by his father until he begged forgiveness from his mother. As Von Sydow descends into insanity, he keeps re-enacting that scene in the closet. His dread of the dark, his punishment and redemption, are constantly replayed; the characters who destroy him are shards of his shattered personality that, by direct transference, come to obsess his wife.

Bergman does not mean his story to be taken solely on the literal level. Von Sydow is also the Creative Artist beset by the bourgeoisie; the island is a metaphor of man's tragic isolation from :he mainland of humanity. Though he has glaring faults as a scenarist, Director Bergman is supreme in handling us troupe; the actors, like Sven Nykvist's phosphorescent photography can ender reality and surreality without missing a heartbeat. Von Sydow is gothically brilliant as the madman; Ullman's ragedienne reinforces her position—already secured by Persona—as one of Scandmavia's major actresses. If in the nd, the Hour of the Wolf suffers from simplistic psychiatry and some less than fresh observations of man's fate, it remains worthwhile simply because Ingar Bergman can turn near homilies to revelations.