Debut: ‘Persona’

As contradictory as it may sound, Persona (2022) is unsettling and disturbing to watch in the best way possible. From the opening seconds of the short film to the very end, the viewer is left with a feeling of unease and uncomfortable self-awareness.

Persona, directed by Moon Su-Jin in her animated debut, is a short film following a young woman struggling to maintain public appearances. The film’s opening shot is a close-up of a smiling, shiny-eyed skinsuit that looks remarkably like a stereotypical Anime character, complete with a large expressive mouth and a small nose.

This skinsuit is the persona, handwashed by a pale, ghostly woman with tired, red eyes, bleary from spending her days in the dark, illuminated only by her cellphone. The film’s title appears as blank strips of a wall are slowly pulled away, animated so slow and stretching that it gives the illusion of skin being peeled back.

While this is a rather uncomfortable way of introducing the title to the viewer, it hints at what lies on the surface versus what lies beneath. The pale wall being peeled away is a grimy white color while the layer revealed is dark red and raw, exposed to the world for perhaps the first time.

The short film speaks to the increasingly-relevant idea of the false identities people adopt when going online. When the young woman, moving through her apartment like a ghost, is summoned by her friends to go out, she pulls her still-wet skinsuit on, becoming the typical bubbly Anime character made popular in numerous Japanese television shows and films.

The following scene shows the woman interacting with her friends, also drawn in a hyper-Anime style, is rich in subtext. The animation style for starters, completely changes. While the films opening is animated with clunky frames which make the woman’s movements, while in her apartment, feel labored and forced, the animation with her friends is smooth and bouncy, again much like Anime. The three friends even pose in typical Anime styles, with peace signs and winky-faced smiles to look “cute.”

It is the forced “cutesy” behavior that speaks to Persona’s themes of false personas. The woman the viewer meets in the apartment is far from the woman seen at the restaurant with her friends. This false attitude and persona represents the facade people put on when interacting with others and the internet, out of fear of social rejection for being one's true self.

Su-Jin shows the ramifications of putting on a false persona, depicting this forced happiness and caricature of someone else as a damaging one that ultimately robs an individual of who they truly are. In a rather disturbing sequence, the woman — back home without her skin suit — watches as her face falls off, piece by piece, while she struggles to breathe.

This struggle is powerfully animated as the woman’s body sucks into itself to convey frantic and rapid breaths that are so powerful, each inhale shows the outline of her ribs. From the perspective of maintaining a false persona, this could be interpreted as an anxiety attack brought about by forcing oneself to be someone untrue to oneself. An alternative interpretation could be that keeping up false appearances is simply too much for anyone to maintain and results in self and results in self-destruction and a loss of identity at the cost of their real one.

Persona is crafted in such a delicate way that either interpretation could feel accurate, hence the film’s uncomfortable self-aware feeling forced upon the viewer. Watching the woman stare at the colorful and energetic pictures taken in the restaurant with emotionless and tired eyes feels all too relatable, perhaps everyone has not maintained a forced persona but most viewers can relate to the feeling of forcing an upbeat smile in public while internally going through hard times.
When a person is not their true self they risk losing sight of who they are and, as Persona suggests, they also risk losing themselves entirely.