Persona (1966)

This film is in Swedish, subtitled in English.

Only a master director could direct a movie like this. It just so happens that Ingmar Bergman is a master of film. Persona is possibly his most eerie film and his best. The psychological aspects of it are analyzed frequently and the acting is superb.

Persona is about an actress named Eva Vogler (Liv Ullman) who, for some reason, has forgotten how to speak. A nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson) is sent to go with Eva when she wants to take a retreat to her house by the beach. As Alma finds it more and more frustrating for her being unable to talk to anyone, she begins to go insane and the two people's personalities eventually meld together.

Persona employs many types of filmmaking, but it's most obscure one is called Brechtitian alienation. This is when the director decides to take the film and cut away to something completely unrelated. The first scene in the movie shows a projector and many other brief images that are seemingly unrelated including an erect penis. Then, Bergman uses this again towards the middle of the film where the film literally rips and then resumes after the sequence of images.

Bergman's stunning direction and the story itself are what merit this film it's place in movie history. Since Persona there have been many movies praying on the same theme such as Fight Club and Single White Female. Personality disorders have been commonly used in movies, but never before like this. Persona is an absolutely revolutionary film that should be viewed by all film fanatics.