Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
Hour of the Wolf is a philosophical horror, a film in which the sense of haunting is heightened by the sensory disorientation of harsh sounds. It opens with metallic clanging, clattering noises. Sounds of machinery, hammering of metal, hurried voices drilling and thrumming, saturating the film in a sense of dynamism, a disorienting movement, a haunting confusion. The cries of the wind, the squealing of the wheelbarrow being pushed up the hill, their haggard breathing, and heavy steps on stone floors. He torments her with his talk of time. A minute is actually an immense space of time... the minute isn’t over yet! She watches and listens to the ticking away of the seconds, face etched with a wearied pain. And then she torments him, though unknowing, unseeing of the effect her words wield. I hope we will get so old that we think each other’s thoughts, and we get little, dried up, identical wrinkled faces... Her face is drawn into a vacant smile while he sits hunched, hands craned jerkily around his head.
It is a film studded with the urgency of fear and time, the instability of human perceptions. Figures emerge from the hills... phantasmagorical creations, hallucinations. This place must be a painter’s dream. The man on the hill rattles on in his absurd talk. I finger people’s souls and turn their insides out. The dialogue is disordered, elliptical, untethered, where sequences start and break off unfinished. We are drawn into the incessant chatter of the counts and countesses of the castle. Here, we enjoy humiliation. We find it pleasurable... our fangs remain intact.... We see Alma and Johan’s haunted expressions. The sores never heal, the pus never ceases to flow.... My fault, my fault, all this suffering. My fault! This man’s piteous wailing surpasses the chatter of the others.
The rhythm is strange and illogical, disorientating. There is no longer a name... but an incantation, a sorcerer’s formula. The hosts of the castle watch, enraptured at the small theatrical performance playing out before them. They turn to the artist, implore him to speak. I may at times have felt the winds of megalomania sweep across my brow. But I need only for one second to remind myself of the utter unimportance of art in the human world in order to cool myself down again. They turn to one another... He speaks a true artist! They appraise him, entranced whilst Alma stands there in a confused despair. Outside of the castle, he is frustratingly and agonisingly unresponsive. Even as she weeps, he is impassive. She sobs his name and he walks on.
There was a time when nights were for sleep. Deep, dreamless sleep. I cannot sleep. I wake out of fear. I have held vigil each night until daylight. But this is the worst hour... hour of the wolf. We see as he replays that awful scene in his mind, confesses it in his confusion to Alma. Strange, how the sea is never still. His whole being appears afflicted with an intense moral hysteria upon pummelling the boy’s head with a rock. But he carries him into the sea with an unnerving collectedness, watches the body sink beneath the bubbles, and then bob back up again, like some kind of phantasm. It resurfaces, then falls for the final time.
As the film unfolds, it seems that these phantasmic figures are spawned from a long harboured obsession with one Veronica Völger. In his feverish yearning, he is propelled back to the castle, where they toy with him and set him on a tangled rally to find her. The old woman takes off her hat so she can hear the music better, and her face peels away with it. She plucks her eyeballs out, plops them into the wine glass. There is a manic absurdity to this film, haunting and increasingly disorienting. The people of the castle make a disturbing spectacle of his reunion with Veronica, dressing him up and laughing hauntingly as he complies, sweating and startled, with their strange insistences. Now you are yourself, yet not yourself. An ideal state for a meeting between lovers.., Come now! They pass through a corridor disturbed by birds; their fitful flight startles the man, though the other is nonchalant.
And when at last he reaches her, Veronica lies on the bed naked, still as a corpse and for a few moments thus she remains, though then she begins to laugh maniacally and he recoils, startled as she kisses him over the face, her manic laughter never ceasing. And then that haunting sound is accompanied by that of the others and suddenly they are all standing there, watching this absurd spectacle, laughing along with her in a strange, haunting theatre. He collapses to the floor, clasping his face. I thank you, that the limit has finally been transgressed. The mirror has been shattered. But what do the splinters reflect? By the end, in the loneliness of the wood, we remain uncertain as to how much of this strange and haunting spectacle is mere delusion.