"It takes great power for an artist to win through to the edge of madness, suicide, memory and guilt so continuously as Bergman does and come back with so much that seems familiar, out of an old dream or an old nightmare. Bergman works where people's nightmares converge. The acting, of course, by Von Sydow, Miss Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin, as the object of his former love is too good to be apparent, and some of the images—the arrival by rowboat of Von Sydow and Miss Ullmann on the desolate shore of the island, Von Sydow running his hand over a naked body he believes to be a corpse, Miss Thulin's legs gradually appearing down from the upper left edge of the screen as she runs to meet him—are as memorable as anything from Bergman's earlier films....Hour of the Wolf is not one of Bergman's great films but it is unthinkable for anyone seriously interested in movies not to see it."


"Twenty-two years ago (Crisis) Bergman was telling the story of a man torn between two women; ten years ago (The Face) he was showing a performer being stripped of his mask, and five years ago (The Silence) he was revealing a single human coin by the examination of both its sides. All these were present in Persona, and they recur again in Hour of the Wolf, augmented on the immediate visual level by such familiar Bergman phrases as the bleached flashback (Sawdust and Tinsel), the errant eyeball (The Face), and the corpse that rises laughing from its slab (Wild Strawberries). Yet there are new departures, too—the dizzying revolve by Nykvist's camera around the dinner-table, the hideous ambivalence of the murder scene, the startling levitation of the Baron (a joke that is delicately capped by von Sydow's nervous glance at the ceiling as he hurries on his way), the jump-cuts with the firing of the gun, the rapturous Lester-style burst of sunlight on the lens as Veronica flings herself into her lover's arms. 'Awful things can happen,' she murmurs. 'Dreams can be revealed.' Nightmares as well, it seems. In the hour before dawn, Bergman's imagination remains the finest, and the most disturbing, of all the cinema's modern visionaries."