Analysis
The film has been interpreted in many different ways and has been the subject of long-standing debates among film fans as well as critics.
Lloyd Michaels sums up what he calls "the most widely held view" of Persona’s content. According to this view, Persona is "a kind of modernist horror movie" Elisabet’s condition, described by a doctor as "the hopeless dream to be", is "the shared condition of both life and film art". Bergman and Elisabet share the same dilemma: they cannot respond authentically to "large catastrophes" (such as the Holocaust or the Vietnam War). The actress Elisabet responds by no longer speaking: by contrast the filmmaker Bergman emphasizes that "necessary illusions" enable us to live.
Susan Sontag suggests that Persona is constructed as a series of variations on a theme of "doubling". The subject of the film, Sontag proposes, is "violence of the spirit". Film scholar P. Adams Sitney offers a completely different reading, arguing that "Persona covertly dramatizes a psychoanalysis from the point of view of a patient".
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