The Face of Another

A Japanese businessman named Okuyama is left with a badly disfigured face after an accident in a laboratory. Alienated from his wife and from the people around him, he turns to a doctor who fits him with a mask so lifelike that it passes for a real face. Wearing it, he finds he can move through the world as a different man, and the freedom the disguise gives him begins to unsettle his sense of who he is.

The film is a drama with science-fiction elements, released in Japan in 1966 and running just over two hours. Hiroshi Teshigahara directed it, working from a screenplay by the writer Kōbō Abe; it followed his 1964 film Woman in the Dunes, and he would not direct another feature until Rikyu in 1989. Tatsuya Nakadai plays Okuyama, with Mikijiro Hira as Dr. Hori, Machiko Kyō as Okuyama's wife and Kyōko Kishida as a nurse. Eiji Okada and Miki Irie also appear among the twenty-two credited cast members. The production was handled by Teshigahara Productions and Tokyo Eiga.

Audience responses place the film favourably: it holds a rating of 7.8 on IMDb from around twelve thousand votes and the same figure on TMDB from roughly three hundred. A critics' rating of 7 out of 10, drawn from seven reviews, sits close to those audience scores, suggesting the film's reputation has held up steadily over the decades since its release.