At first, you think of Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 psychological horror film, which shares its name. Malthouse Theatre’s artistic director Matthew Lutton is – after all – fond of stage adaptations of sci-fi and horror cinema, from Solaris to Nosferatu. But Hour of the Wolf has virtually nothing in common with Bergman’s genuinely scary descent into madness, neither thematically nor on the level of basic plot.
It’s a further dive into “immersive theatre” after Malthouse’s 2021 production Because the Night. That show riffed on Hamlet in a visually arresting but dramatically inert way; the script, by Lutton, Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Ra Chapman felt painfully prosaic when held against Shakespeare’s original. With Hour of the Wolf, Lutton has handed over the playwriting duties to Keziah Warner, who also penned his Nosferatu. It works better – which is still not to say it works at all.
