Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A young nurse, Alma, is put in charge of Elisabeth Vogler: an actress who is seemingly healthy in all respects, but will not talk. As they spend time together, Alma speaks to Elisabeth constantly, never receiving any answer.
Persona is one of cinema's most radical and enduring achievements. Bergman's screenplay dissolves the boundary between two women until identity itself becomes unstable — a genuinely revolutionary structural and thematic conception. Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson deliver performances of extraordinary psychological depth, sustaining ambiguity across long, almost wordless stretches. Sven Nykvist's black-and-white cinematography is among the finest ever committed to film, each frame composed with near-painful precision. Novelty is near-absolute: no film before or since inhabits quite this psychological and formal space. The ending earns a slight downgrade — not because it fails, but because Bergman's recursive, deliberately inconclusive dissolution is the one element that leaves some viewers at an aesthetic distance rather than a deeper one, and it is the dimension where the film's opacity curdles most toward opacity for its own sake.