The Face of Another

"The face is the door to the soul. When the face is closed off, so too it the soul"

The Face of Another explored the masks that we wear and how some of them lead to social isolation. And whether it’s more personally efficacious to be seen or to engage in banal invisibility.

Okuyama suffered a disfiguring accident at the factory where he worked leaving his face unrecognizable. His wife attempts to lift his spirits but he accuses her of patronizing him. When she spurns an awkward advance, he becomes enraged. He visits Dr. Hori, a psychiatrist and scientist, who is capable of making natural looking human masks. Hori develops a mask for Okuyama but warns the new face could cause his personality to change.

Nakadai Tatsuya gave a subtly nuanced performance as the deeply scarred man. At times he wore the burned skin or had his head completely swaddled in bandages. At other times his face was buried beneath Hori’s concoctions which had to be claustrophobic. And ultimately, he had a mish-mash of the different masks he wore. In all these iterations he was unable to use his expressive eyes and yet still gave a compelling performance. Kyo Machiko as Okuyama’s nameless wife hit all the right notes as a woman who strove to help her husband and was also deeply hurt from his emotional taunts. Hira Mikijiro as Dr. Hori was the epitome of a mad scientist, constantly pushing Okuyama’s emotional buttons, seeing how far the mask would transform his patient’s personality.

The film’s dialogue was heavy handed in describing the masks we wear. Masks that help us fit in, masks that set us apart, masks that enslave us and masks that set us free. Dr. Hori kept telling Okuyama that the mask was changing him. I’m not so sure about that. Okuyama was an unlikeable and manipulative character before the mask. The mask just emboldened him to act on his baser impulses. I didn’t comprehend Hiro’s declaration that if everyone wore one of his masks that there would be true freedom with no crime and there would be no need for trust or betrayal. No one would have a home so there would be no home to escape from. There was also a secondary story that never overlapped with Okuyama’s. A beautiful (nameless) young woman who suffered with scars on the side of her face due to the bombing in Nagasaki appeared periodically. Like Okuyama, she received unwanted negative attention for being different. She worked at a mental hospital populated by WWII soldiers. Desperately afraid that another war would hit the country, she seemed to represent the traumatic scars marring the beauty of Japan. Or she was a random character. This film had a lot of symbolism.

Director Teshigahara Hiroshi created a surreal world complete with a German beer garden and a hallucination inducing mad scientist laboratory. His use of different effects bordered on the gimmicky but I quite enjoyed his style. The acting was exemplary and the darkly lilting music perfectly enhanced the story. The story, however, was difficult for me as it wallowed in hopelessness and despair. Despite everyone wearing different masks, there were some that were unacceptable. Disfigurement meant exile, the crushing pain of rejection, or invisibility. Okuyama and the scarred young woman faced the price of a society unable to see past their scars, both physical and psychological. Death or madness was all that awaited them. Fair warning, The Face of Another was unrelentingly dark. Pass the popcorn and the Tylenol.

12 October 2025

Trigger warning: brief nudity and a brief incestuous situation

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