Not to belabor the point (such lighting has become so commonplace), but compare the shadows on Von Sydow's face with the shadows often used to frame Emerson's character, Ben Linus (see below).
It's e
asy, of course, to make superficial comparisons with Lost. Afte
r all, Bergman's film is set on a remote island where we don't always know what's real and what's not, while Von Sydow's artist, Johan Borg, is almost always shot in partial shadow. But Hour of the Wolf is really more like what would happen if the unutterable humiliations found in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf were visited upon an insomniac already on the verge of a mental breakdown... and visited upon him by supernatural monsters. All I can say is that, psychologically, Bergman must have been having a pretty bad year.
As a filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman dealt with his personal anxieties and demons by turning them into movies. So Hour of the Wolf is not merely a brooding meditation on the theme of madness. It is actually a very personal film. Von Sydow is largely standing in for Bergman, who had himself suffered (and been hospitalized for) a significant mental breakdown only couple of years earlier. While Bergman grappled with the darkness, Von Sydow (a frequent Bergman actor) had been playing Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, one of the last all-star biblical epics.
Okay, so now I'll 'fess up before I bore you with an endless stream of Bergman and Von Sydow trivia. I "found" Bergman during the requisite "post mortem" viewing of what I assumed would be a medicinal dose of just one or two of the director's films. I'd been avoiding his work my entire adult life because of the whole "tortured Swedish artist" thing that Emerson mentions. But with his death, I decided it was time to see at least one Bergman film.
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