Persona is a 1966 Swedish avant-garde psychological drama film[n 1] written, directed, and produced by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann.

The story revolves around a young nurse named Alma (Andersson) and her patient, well-known stage actress Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann), who has suddenly stopped speaking.

The film's exploration of duality, insanity, and personal identity has been interpreted as reflecting the Jungian theory of persona and dealing with issues related to filmmaking, vampirism, homosexuality, motherhood, abortion, and other subjects.

It received positive reviews at its initial release with Swedish press outlets coining the word Person(a)kult to describe its enthusiastic admirers.

[31] Professor Irving Singer, examining the shot in which Alma and Elisabet's faces are combined, compared its repulsive effect to that of seeing Robert Louis Stevenson's character Mr. Hyde instead of his benign alter ego, Dr. Jekyll.

Singer wrote that Bergman expanded on Stevenson's exploration of duality, the "good and evil, light and dark aspects of our nature", depicting it as "oneness" in the shot.

[39] Alma's secret is revealed in her orgy monologue, and critic Robin Wood related it to a combination of shame and nostalgia perhaps indicating the character's sexual liberation.

[46] Cinema historian P. Adams Sitney summarized the story as following the course of psychoanalysis: a referral, followed by the first interview, disclosures, transference, and the discovery of the patient's root problem.

[21] Alison Darren profiled Persona in her Lesbian Film Guide, calling Alma and Elisabet's relationship "halfway between love and hate"; they may come close to having sex in one scene, "though this might easily be an illusion".

[55] Scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster interpreted the film in feminist terms as a depiction of lesbianism, viewing the scene where Elisabet enters Alma's room as seduction.

[56] Professor Alexis Luko also felt that the characters' touching and resemblance in the scene, in addition to symbolizing their personalities merging, indicated intimacy and eroticism.

Although Alma initially believes that artists "created out of compassion, out of a need to help", she sees Elisabet laugh at performances on a radio program and finds herself the subject of the actress's study.

[75] The Independent journalist Christopher Hooton said that symmetry was used and the fourth wall sometimes broken, quoting essayist Steven Benedict on the use of "reflections, splitting the screen, and shadows".

[86] The story's small scale is supplemented with references to external horrors, such as images of self-immolation—included in the opening sequence and the hospital scene—and the Holocaust photograph, the subject of increasing close-ups.

[87] Biographer Jerry Vermilye wrote that despite experimenting with color in 1964's All These Women, Persona represented Bergman and Nykvist's return to the "stark black-and-white austerity of earlier chamber pieces".

[51] Examining the visuals and the depiction of social isolation and mourning, critics Christopher Heathcote and Jai Marshall found parallels to Edvard Munch's paintings.

[57] Musicologist Alexis Luko described the score as conveying "semantic meaning" with diabolus in musica ("the devil in music"), a common style in horror cinema.

[n 5] Steve Vineberg wrote that, with the conception of the project with Andersson and Ullmann, Bergman parted with his past uses of ensemble casts in films such as Smiles of a Summer Night and focused on two leads.

[22] Bergman told his actresses not to ask him what each scene meant; Ullmann believed that cinematographer Sven Nykvist was also not informed of the director's intentions and left to work intuitively.

[100] For the scene in which Andersson and Ullmann meet in the bedroom at night and their faces overlap, a large amount of smoke was used in the studio to make a blurrier shot.

[133] Two scenes censored from the U.S. and U.K. versions of the film were a brief shot at the beginning of an erect penis[134] and some of the translation of Alma's nighttime monologue about the orgy, oral sex and abortion.

[145] Bosley Crowther, writing for The New York Times, called Persona a "lovely, moody film which, for all its intense emotionalism, makes some tough intellectual demands".

[42] Empire's David Parkinson gave the film five stars in 2000, noting its variety of interpretations and attributing them to Bergman's distortion of the border between real life and fantasy and calling it a "devastating treatise on mortal and intellectual impotence".

[154] For The Chicago Tribune, Michael Wilmington awarded it four stars in 2006 and praised it as "one of the screen's supreme works and perhaps Ingmar Bergman's finest film".

[156] The New Yorker's Pauline Kael said the end result was a "pity", but the scene where Alma describes her orgy is "one of the rare truly erotic sequences in movie history".

[157] Reviewing Persona's home video, Richard Brody credited Bergman for a work that shed realism with special effects and conveyed "a tactile visual intimacy", and praised the film's island setting.

The website's consensus reads: "Arguably Bergman's finest film, Persona explores the human condition with intense curiosity, immense technical skill, and beguiling warmth.

[185] Altman's 1977 film 3 Women takes cues from Bergman as Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek's characters (Millie and Pinky) shift roles and identities.

[41] Jean-Luc Godard included a parody of Andersson's orgy monologue in his 1967 film Weekend, in a scene where Mireille Darc describes a threesome with a lover and his girlfriend involving eggs and a bowl of milk.

[41][190] Parallels to "two (usually isolated) women in an intense relationship slowly blending and morphing into one another" may be seen in the competing ballerinas in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) and the sisters in Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011).