Essential Arthouse: Persona (1966)
A nurse is put in charge of a mute actress and finds that their personae are melding together. (NR, 83 min.)
Showtimes
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
7:00 PM
Essential Arthouse: This monthly series showcases “essential arthouse” films everyone should see on the big screen. Arthouse is a film genre which encompasses films where the content and style – often artistic or experimental – adhere with as little compromise as possible to the filmmakers’ personal artistic vision. This series is Free for Members.
By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, this supreme artist attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference that would prove to be one of cinema’s most influential creations. Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by the great Sven Nykvist, Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth. [Janus]
Starring: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Language: Swedish
Genre: Drama, Thriller
"[A] masterpiece."
— J. Hoberman, Village Voice
"Bergman at his most brilliant."
— Derek Adams, Time Out
"An unforgettable hour and a half."
— Kevin Maher, The Times (UK)
"The quintessential, mid-century art film."
— Josh Larsen, LarsenOnFilm
"One of the screen's supreme works and perhaps Ingmar Bergman's finest film."
— Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
"Wonderfully complex but warmly human, Bergman's drama is one of his very best."
— David Parkinson, Empire Magazine
"It's not a horror story but a poem, and remarkable for that. This is one of the director's masterworks."
— TV Guide
"Made in the mid-60s, his film's intensity and mysteriousness remain undimmed despite the passage of time."
— Tom Dawson, BBC.com
"Despite its elaborate meta-game-playing, which has had a pronounced and unquantifiable influence on film culture, Persona remains intensely alive and intimate."
— Chuck Bowen, Slant
"This original and individual work acts upon us in its own way; what is finally impossible to escape are the faces of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, agonized objects of Bergman's worship."
— Robert Kotlowitz, Harper's Magazine
"The intimacy and the intensity of the camera's focus and the increasingly naked confessions and accusations in the dialogue create one of the most intense character pieces put on film."
— Sean Axmaker, Parallax View
"The ambiguous nature of this work discussing identity, modernity and duality, alongside its technical feats in cinematography allow it to be an expansive platform for discussion and analysis."
— Chloe Leeson, Screen Queens
"A succession of ever more difficult and rewarding films has turned up in recent years. But that good fortune releases nobody who cares about films from acclaiming work as original and triumphant as Persona."
— Susan Sontag, Sight & Sound
"Certainly Persona is Bergman's most concentrated work, in a sense a summation of the themes dominant in most of his previous films; and it is undeniably a difficult film, if only because it leaves itself open to so many interpretations."
— David Wilson, Monthly Film Bulletin
"You might not understand it all right away, or even after multiple viewings, but there is nothing about Persona that is forgettable. It is an experience that sticks with you and gnaws at you, compelling you back to it again and again."
— James Kendrick, Q Network Film Desk
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