When the faces merge in Persona, I see two people bound by loneliness and shame, to the point where they no longer understand who is who—two completely different people and disparate identities becoming one.
What Persona produces, onscreen and in its critics, is more than the sum of its narrative parts. Amid its formal weirdness is a forceful double vision, a dual insistence on the close-up and the monologue as potent, parallel forms: expressive yet withholding, and collapsible under the burden of interpretation.