Johan can't escape from traumas past, he's tormented, harrowed, provoked and harassed, his mind is playing tricks, it tortures, taunts, afflicts, leaves him confused, muddled, perplexed and aghast.

A surreal overflowing meltdown, full of symbolism, abstraction and confusion, as the artist Johan Borg struggles to cope with the visions and apparitions that haunt his disturbed being. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman once again present us with characters from the imagination of Ingmar Bergman that exist in an alien world, or at least one most of us are quite unfamiliar with (thank goodness), in a piece of cinema, like so many others from the director, that need revisiting whenever you get the chance, if for no other reason than to see what you missed previously.

"The Hour of the Wolf" refers to that particular moment between night and day where sleep is at its deepest, where most dreams -consequently nightmares- gets the realest feeling, where most people die and are born, where we're at the most fragile and vulnerable state. In the end, it is such a fascinating accumulation of superlatives of creepy undertones, it would've been impossible for an explorer of the human condition like Ingmar Bergman not to tackle it.

And to illustrate the eeriness of the titular notion, Bergman translates it into a mysterious pathology that took possession of a tortured artist's soul; a painter named Johan Borg and played by Max Von Sydow. The film is based on the fictional notes taken before his death (or disappearance?) and revealed in front of the camera by his widow (?) Alma, played by Liv Ullman. The two actors star again in a Bergmanian film in the same year than "Shame", Bergman's anti-war pamphlet but this is one more obscure and puzzling film, even by Bergman's standards.

In fact, the film made me realize that despite the heavy psychological material carried by most Bergman movies, they were pretty much straight-forward about their subject and at the end, it was always a part of our human condition that revealed to us, mirrored by our relationship with time, with God, with the others. It's like each Bergman's movie played like a piece of puzzle that would constitute a magnificent and intelligent study of the human soul. But "The Hour of the Wolf" is one of these pieces of the puzzle you don't know where to put.

This is not to separate the film from Bergman's other works, it's his first and –I guess- only take on supernatural and surrealistic material, and the result is aesthetically nightmarish and conveys well the horror inhabiting Johan's soul, but Bergman, as inaccessible as he is, always found a way to guide us to his characters, even at the price of a second viewing. I wanted to understand what was going into Johan's mind, was that sickness? Hallucinations? In a way, Alma mirrors these very feelings and like her, we want to know more about him.

Some shadows of answers come when she sneaks into his diary, the reading episodes provide the first hints: one creepy dream involving a kid trying to kill him and an idyll with a girl named Vogler and played by Ingrid Thullin. Shot in high contrast and with a pretty furious editing, the kid's killing and drowning is one of the most disturbing sequences I've ever seen, my guess is that it supposed to evoke the repression of some childhood episodes, and maybe the child Johan kills is himself, the clue comes from his revelation of a childhood trauma later to Alma.

The Vogler episode is echoed during a dinner where the couple meets a group of rich and eccentric slobs to the limits of perversity bourgeois (lead by Erland Josephson). They all seem to know about Johans' affair. They're obnoxious, uneducated, aggressive, one of the lady literally jumps at Johans, Josephson's wife implies that they try to take him from his wife, they're the closest players to the antagonists, and leave us a sentiment of total discomfort, like these creepy nightmares where we don't know where we are but can't wait to get the hell out.

I guess "The Hour of the Wolf" encapsulates this feeling of continuous entrapment and impossibility to escape from a situation without getting through it, it's probably these repressed feelings that come back to the surface to better torture us. Maybe it's a surrealistic definition of guilt, guilt from one man's weakness. Which might explain that Johan decided to isolate himself from the world in the remote house leaving a peaceful and dull life with Alma, while he's lived quite a torturous and much more cinematically appealing life?

And maybe the third act is the price he finally paid by not being totally sincere with his wife. It's made of a whole long sequence where they search Max in the forest, while he's in the castle and must play some twisted and pervert games, nudity, make-up, crows, all the most unsettling archetypes of nightmares are used … and at the end, nothing but absence, absence of Max, of explanations … "The Hour of the Wolf" leaves many interrogations, and so does the film. Right now, I'm still having this 'what the hell did I see?' expression I had when it ended.

I certainly wouldn't be a fan of Bergman if I had seen this first, but because I'm a fan, I try to see the film with more magnanimous eyes. I can accept the absence of definite answers and the way Bergman drowns his work into his own creativity, my take is that Bergman invites us to embrace these moments where we're directly haunted by our own demons, where we must face the true facet of our personality, when the nightmare gets its realest feeling, perhaps the closest moment in life is when it looks like a nightmare.

"The Hour of the Wolf" is certainly the closest Bergman's film to a nightmare and I wonder if the deliberate noises he made at the beginning of the film were made to reassure us that we were only watching a film, as to insist that no matter how creepy this stuff is, it's still the product of one's imagination. I guess I prefer Bergman when he approaches our reality, but even the way we handle our reality is conditioned by our subconscious, and all the feelings we try to repress. Maybe this is "The Hour of the Wolf", this moment where for some reason; we have good reasons to act irrational.

But I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a first Bergman's film.