A brilliant Gothic fantasy, one reviewer rhapsodized about Ingmar Bergman's "Hour of the Wolf". And, it appears, it has staying power as a classic, one of those films one would wish to re-visit, time and again, to find ever-more-revealed hidden features, messages, revelations of critical importance to understanding one's own inner insecurities and phantasmal nightmares.

Max von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin

Last night, we decided we would view the film. We generally set aside Saturday night for this kind of entertainment. "Hour of the Wolf" could not be characterized, however, quite as 'entertainment'. It looked vaguely promising, even setting aside the bleakness of the description of the film's trajectory. And, after all, Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman are themselves living legends of the serious film industry.

Of course, there is also the mystique of genius surrounding Ingmar Bergman, whose many films which mine his own inner sanctum of memory and familial dysfunction have made him famous. There is something truly bleak about the Scandinavian vision of normalcy and hapless human behaviour (?!) and the manner in which it portrays human interactions; similar to the human misery in East European films.

This one put my husband to sleep in short order, but I didn't mind, because we were cuddled together on the sofa, ostensibly to share a viewing experience of great merit. What it was, actually, despite that The Hollywood Reporter had gushed of it as "A manifestation of unique genius", was, to me, a lugubrious, self-indulgent bleakness of enormous proportions.

Just my opinion, of course. It unveiled itself to me as an unfortunate cross between a film about Vincent Van Gogh's dreadfully sad life driven by both his inner demons and his great art, and the film about "The Return of Martin Guerre".