Review: The Face of Another is marked by beautiful and sometimes psychedelic cinematography which, along with the consistently excellent music from Takemitsu, makes it feel like a horror movie. Indeed, the film and original novel share some common traits with Frankenstein (the novel even introduces the story of Frankenstein into the narrative), though in the case of The Face of Another there is also the spectre of Japan's physical, emotional and cultural scars from WW2 which share space in the subtext along with the explorations of isolation, separation and masquerade within human society.

Following the opening credits, the movie begins with Okuyama speaking while his head is being x-rayed; we can see right through him as he describes the circumstances of his accident. His face as it appeared before the accident never shown to the viewer, from this point on Okuyama finds himself lost more and more; he muses that without eyes and a face with which to interact with the outside world, all senses become numbed and one's sense of self is weakened. He also questions his own worth which had previously thought to be determined by his work and accomplishments, but since he feels his friends and particularly his wife reacting distantly to him, he wonders if perhaps his outward appearance is more important than his work. Kobo Abe wrote almost exclusively on these themes of alienation, and The Face of Another might even be thought to be a temporally dislocated sequel of sorts to his later novel (also a movie by Teshigahara, included in the box set), The Ruined Map (the movie is called The Man Without a Map), which examines a character who slowly begins to lose sense of himself. Kobo Abe graduated as a medical Doctor, so it should not surprise us that the hero of his story resorts to meticulous scientific procedure in order to try to lose his loneliness and regain his self-worth.

The horror and paranoia which arises from Okuyama's loss of personal identity and his subsequent adoption of a new personality with his new mask is powerfully presented, with the film's stylized sets and psychologically disorientating camera work alienating the audience in much the same way that Okuyama's bandages and subsequent mask distance him from society. Marking a departure from his work on The Pitfall and The Woman in the Dunes, Takemitsu 's soundtrack for The Face of Another includes some conventionally harmonic (and dramatically emotional) compositions which, intermingled with his abstract pieces, lend a powerful musical underpinning to the movie.