By Simon Thompson
Director Takashi Komatsu and writing duo Hiroshi Hashimoto and Osamu Soda’s Persona (no relation to the acclaimed video game franchise of the same name or the Bergman movie) is a visually alluring, if slightly repetitive, piece of psychological horror that, while never teetering off into full-blown tedium, still drags a fair bit across its 1 hour and 30 minute run time.
The plot of Persona follows the daily lives of a group of high school students, whose various worlds are turned upside down when an often bullied student, by the name of Danda, turns up one day in an Eyes Wide Shut style party mask as a statement about his predicament. This causes the other students at the school to adopt wearing masks as a kind of fashion statement, which subsequently spills out into other areas of society with dire consequences.
Running concurrently with this plot are the exploits of another student at the school named Yuki ( Maya Kurosu), who comes into contact with a mask maker named Akira Dojima ( Tatsuya Fujiwara), whose handiwork is influencing the events of the story.
Visually, cinematographer Hiroshi Takahashi uses a warm colour palette which pairs well with the interior locations such as the school, or Akira’s studio, creating a sharp contrast between the tone and themes of the story and the vivid eye-pleasing colour scheme. Komatsu’s use of close-ups, allows the audience to appreciate the surreal visual qualities and underlying threatening ambiguity that the masks bring to the narrative, which is a tried and tested recurring trope in horror for a reason – with everything from Phantom Of The Opera to Eyes Without A Face to that one episode of The Twilight Zone recognising their potential.
The acting in Persona is pretty consistent across the board, nobody gives a laughably terrible Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style performance, but by the same token there aren’t any true standouts- with the two main actors Maya Kurosu and Tatsuya Fujiwara both giving roughly similar 7 out of 10 level performances.
Where the true flaws creep in, however, is in the movie’s pacing. Once the masks are introduced and the inciting incident happens roughly 45 minutes or so into the movie, Persona becomes a bit of a chore to get through as you get the feeling that Komatsu is playing for time rather than trying to build further upon the atmosphere he had been cultivating previously. While it doesn’t sink the film entirely, it is still a downgrade from the quality shown in the first act, to a noticeable extent.
Overall Persona, while being a commendably brave and original horror film, still suffers from numerous pacing issues which hold it back from earning a full-blown personal recommendation from me.
Persona has been released as part of Arrow Video’s J-Horror Rising boxset.
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