Persona (2024) Movie Review: Silly, Tacky Captivity Drama Has Neither Tension Nor Edge

Mike Ho’s “Persona” (2024) is a kidnapping drama sans any color and texture. A woman wakes up in an unknown house. She has no recollection of the circumstances that transpired and has brought her there. She fumbles around for clues and markers that can give her a certainty or inkling of the stuff that has gone down here. Groping in the dark, she stumbles across another bruised woman, Samantha. It is only after some effort the woman recalls her name being Tricia.

What’s definite, however, is the reality of the house where the two are caged. The exits are all sealed up. But the ominousness of the captor lingers in the air. At any point, he may be back. There’s no real threat though the endangering man makes his appearance brashly. The film is essentially circling two women who are bracing themselves for the inevitable return of the kidnapper. They have nothing to shield them against the impending series of attacks and incursions.

Samantha is wounded and gets the intensity of the situation. Tricia, on the other hand, is almost settled and not as animated and anxious as she should be. Samantha lashes at her for the same. Why can’t she behave like a normal human being? Isn’t she terrified? Doesn’t she want to flee? Her passivity and acceptance of captivity disconcert Samantha greatly, who is impassioned and desperate to break out no matter her wounds. There’s initially not a shred of resistance in her, as opposed to the charged-up Samantha.

It’s the latter who revs her up and gets her to envisage a possibility of liberation, escape, and a future beyond the constraining house. Gradually, the oddness of Tricia’s reposed responses melts away, as she is called on to be more reactive and defensive about her well-being. How can she not retaliate? Neither of them can even recall how it is they came to be in the house. Their memories seem to have become clean slates. Anything that might have happened preceding their arrival at the house is not even a foggy memory; it’s gone. But slowly Samantha starts to have her memory come back to her.

“Persona” relies heavily on a shock climactic twist. It serves to reorient our understanding of the characters and their dynamics. It’s not a massively unexpected one, though. Throughout the film, there is a growing awareness that things aren’t as black and white as they are made out to be. Binaries between the kidnapper and the kidnapped are undercut. However, the weight and impact of the ‘surprising’ discovery doesn’t land any significant, tragic, or dramatic blow, or at least the way it intends. There’s no clear graph accompanying character work. It’s so arbitrary and randomly orchestrated, without a sense of personality or edge that “Persona” feels cobbled together hastily at short notice. It all feels impersonal and detached despite the occasional insertions of fraught family histories of certain characters.

At one point, Samantha goes on a mini-rant about her mother, with whom she has a strained relationship. She knows her mother means well for her but has had enough of her controlling ways, choosing not to speak well for over a year. Tricia displays empathy. Almost immediately, Samantha recognizes the need to reconnect with her mother. The entire conversation between the two women is done impetuously as if the makers have suddenly realized they should flesh out the characters a wee bit more. This never feels credible at all, instead coming off as loosely taped in to thrust emotional depth, a tussle forced in with no implications.

“Persona” can’t move beyond lazy, tepid writing and nonsensical character-driven decisions. There’s even trauma and fighting it which is shoved into the mix. Given how atrocious the film is on every level, you can’t help but be struck by the audacity of the makers to choose a title with its obvious linkages to the Bergman classic. The film doesn’t earn its protracted length either. In fact, there’s not an ounce of tautness in the screenplay. Its atmosphere is diffused from the get-go. You struggle to feel what the locked-up characters are aching for.

At one point one of them gets all hyperactive once her memory apparently floods back, her maternal urge elicited. The result makes for a downright hilarious scene, when what should have been a pang of anxiety and ferocity. Clumsily staged scenes sink this film, which tries at several moments to locate emotional scars and a hope of surpassing gaslighting.