The Face of Another

The Face of Another (他人の顔, 1966) is a Japanese psychological drama by director Hiroshi Teshigahara — watch it online on iFILM. After a laboratory accident destroys his face, a businessman agrees to an extreme medical experiment: his psychiatrist constructs a silicone mask so lifelike it passes as skin. Tatsuya Nakadai plays a man who gradually stops recognising the person wearing it.

With the mask on, he decides to seduce his own wife without telling her who he is. She responds to him. What that reveals — and what she already knew — is the screenplay's sharpest knife. The script was written by Kōbō Abe, adapting his own novel, and it carries the same cold precision as the prose. Running alongside this is a second story: a young woman whose face was scarred in the war, who has no mask to hide behind and no one willing to look.

Teshigahara frames the whole thing as a question about social contract rather than science fiction — a face is an agreement with the world, and losing it strips away every protection. One of the most unsettling Japanese films of the 1960s. Stream The Face of Another (1966) online on iFILM.