To peel back the skin of reality to observe the void pulsing beneath. This could well be the declaration of intent, the unwritten manifesto, that inextricably links the filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara and the writer Kōbō Abe, an artistic partnership that generated some of the most searing and cerebral explorations of 20th-century alienation. If Woman in the Dunes was a Kafkaesque allegory on the imprisonment of existence, "The Face of Another" (Tanin no Kao, 1966) is its logical and terrifying corollary: a surgical incursion into the very ontology of identity, a treatise on phenomenology disguised as a psychological thriller. The film opens not with an event, but with its consequences: the bandages that completely envelop the face of the engineer Okuyama, disfigured in a laboratory accident. We never see his original face, nor the ruined one. He exists only in relation to an absence, to a shroud of gauze that transforms him into a modernist icon of pain, a Wellsian Invisible Man, yet one stripped of all power, crushed by the absolute visibility of his own erasure.

Teshigahara, son of the founder of the Sōgetsu-ryū school of ikebana, directs with the precision of someone composing an art installation. His frames are sculptures of light and shadow, architectural spaces that oppress and define the characters. The laboratory of Dr. Hira, where Okuyama goes to have a perfect mask constructed, is not the lair of some new-age Gothic Frankenstein, but an aseptic temple of science, amidst anatomical charts, plaster casts, and amber liquids. It is an aesthetic that seems to anticipate by a decade the bio-mechanical obsessions of David Cronenberg, but stripped of its more visceral body horror to concentrate on a purely intellectual dread. Okuyama’s disfigurement is not a B-movie aetiology; it is a philosophical catalyst. The question the film poses, from its very first minutes, is devastating in its simplicity: if the face is the guarantor of our social self, the passport with which we cross the frontier of human relations, what remains of us when it is revoked?

The mask, then, is no mere prosthetic artifice. It is a theoretical construct, a doctoral thesis on the possibility of existence. Crafted with an uncanny skill and endowed with an artificial "life" of its own, it becomes for Okuyama an opportunity for rebirth, but also a gateway to a solipsistic abyss. Donning it, he doesn’t recover his old self; he creates an entirely new one, an other who can observe the world, and even his own wife, with the detachment of a spectator. It is here that the film makes its most brilliant swerve. The narrative splits in two. Okuyama, now a stranger with a handsome, anonymous face, decides to test his wife’s fidelity by attempting to seduce her. The affair takes on the contours of a perverse chamber drama, an emotional chiasmus recalling the geometric, cruel rigour of a Fassbinder film, or the cold analysis of relationships in a Bergman film noir. Tatsuya Nakadai, a favourite of both Kobayashi and Kurosawa, gives a masterful performance, acting for much of the film with only his voice and body, and then doubling as his masked self, a doppelgänger who is at once liberation and condemnation.

The most immediate parallel, and perhaps the nerdiest, is not so much with cinema as with the literature of Philip K. Dick. Okuyama, like Dick’s protagonists, experiences a radical schism between self-perception and objective reality. The mask is his ‘Substance D’ from A Scanner Darkly, a tool that should allow him to navigate the exterior world but which ends up irrevocably corroding the interior. Both works explore the terrifying possibility that identity is not a stable core, but a fragile performance, a tacit agreement that can be torn up at any moment. Teshigahara, however, does not simply illustrate Abe's novel. He expands it, complicates it, inserting a second narrative thread, a film-within-the-film that Okuyama watches in a cinema. It tells the story of a young woman whose face is disfigured by a scar (a keloid), another victim of the surface, a metaphorical hibakusha who bears the mark of trauma on her skin. This parenthesis, which risked being a didactic appendix, becomes instead a distorting mirror that universalises Okuyama’s condition. His is no longer an individual tragedy, but a fragment of the vaster drama of the human condition in the age of the anonymous metropolis and the technical reproducibility of the self.

This reflection fits perfectly within the context of the Nūberu bāgu, the Japanese New Wave. Like his contemporaries Oshima and Imamura, Teshigahara dismantles the conventions of classical cinema, but his approach is less confrontational, less political in the narrow sense. His is a revolution of form and of thought. The Japan of the 1960s, in the midst of its economic boom, was experiencing a profound identity crisis, suspended between the physical and psychological rubble of the war and the race towards a Westernised modernity that threatened to erase traditional features. "The Face of Another" captures this anxiety with stunning visual power. The skyscrapers of Tokyo, the shop windows reflecting anonymous faces, the indistinct crowds—this is the film’s true scenography. It is no accident that the film concludes with Okuyama, following the failure of his experiment and the definitive loss of himself, dissolving into a crowd of people who, one after another, reveal that they are wearing masks. His pathology has become the norm. Society is a perennial masked ball.

The score by Tōru Takemitsu, an avant-garde patchwork of musique concrète, distorted waltzes, and tension-laden silences, is the final layer of this complex work. It does not accompany the action, but rather comments on it, interrogates it, creating a soundscape that is the aural equivalent of the protagonist’s bewilderment. Takemitsu’s music is the irregular heartbeat of a soul that has lost its shell. "The Face of Another" is a total cinematic experience, a work that challenges the viewer with every frame, forcing us to question the nature of our own identity. It offers no easy answers, only increasingly complex questions. It is a philosophical scalpel that incises the smooth surface of the screen to reveal not blood, but the conceptual void that defines us. An absolute masterpiece, a film whose viewing is not merely recommended, but essential for anyone who believes that cinema can be a form of thought.