When I chatted to actress Elizabeth Olsen about this month's title she told me she had recently watched Ingmar Bergman's movie The Hour Of The Wolf and was now reading various critics' opinions on it. Inspired by what she saw and read she placed upon my shoulders the title, The Disintegration Of A Personality, an analysis she said she loved not from a clinical perspective but more a creative one. Deep breath in, I thought, lemme sit with this for a moment. Wishing someone would just give me a title as simple as, say, the color Pink I finally started smiling again when I realized this would mean I could watch a guilt-free movie during the day time all in the name of research. What I didn’t realize though was the kind of movie I was getting into. Being a Bergman movie I should have perhaps been a bit more prepared for the psychedelic madness that shat on my brain, instead I was knocked sideways by the beautifully shot horror that unfolded in front of me. Darkness, exhaustion and breakdown ice picked into my mind as one man slid into his own terrifying illusory nightmare. The lines between reality and fantasy very quickly blurred, thoughts became distorted, form changed, fear was everywhere. I no more knew what was real than Johan Borg did. Playing with Lizzie's words, I made my sense of the title, the different things it could mean and how it broke down, while giving a nod to the meaning of The Hour Of The Wolf - “The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway…” Something I'm sure we have all, at some dark point, been unwillingly privy to.

Previous
Previous

Christiopher Lowell

Next
Next

Irvine Welsh