(There’s actually a tie at #17. The other is The Seven Samurai, which I’ve previously seen.)

So when I watch these movies, I don’t read much about them beforehand, and then read a bunch of stuff afterward. So I really had no idea what I was getting here. I’ve seen an Ingmar Bergman film before — The Seventh Seal, the famous one with death playing chess, right. And it was fine, so my expectations here were for something like that. But no, this is enormously better.

Enough so that I almost don’t want to spoil it in talking about it, because I think it’s better to see it not knowing what it is at all, and you should see it, for at least some values of “you.” But hey, it’s a fifty year old movie, and if you’re still reading, then my super-vague sales job didn’t work on you, so it’s go time.

So what this is, is basically a psychological thriller, or maybe even a stark horror film, tinged with some post-modern surrealism. It opens with a montage of images and music that remind me of nothing so much as the end of 2001, and I was actually unsure if it was going to just be 90 minutes of that or if there was a plot or what; but after a bit, the starkly modernist black-on-white credits come up, and the plot begins: An actress has stopped moving or speaking, and a nurse is assigned to help her; they go to the countryside and then the rest of the movie is about the two of them together in a lonely seaside cottage.

One of them never speaks; the other does little else. There are dream sequences (some of which are ambiguously real, others of which are clearly not). The relationship between the two women starts out warmly, and then turns suspicious and paranoid and angry. Much of the movie is just staring at their faces, silent or speaking; for one lengthy, chilling monologue, we see the whole thing focused on one of the women’s faces, and then see the whole thing again focused on the other woman’s face.

I said about Au Hasard Balthazar that it’s all well and good for a movie to be symbolic and admit to all kinds of interpretations, but it has to actually work first. Persona sure as shit is open to all kinds of interpretations and symbolism — and it absolutely, no questions, flat-out works. It’s the first movie I’ve watched yet where I never paused it or (worse) glanced at my phone without bothering to pause it. Riveting and compelling.

The caveat on that praise is that this is the kind of movie that I tend to like more than most people — it reminds me more than a bit of Soderbergh’s Solaris, and the similarities to 2001 go beyond just the opening montage. The caveat on the caveat is that a bunch of film critics think it’s one of the best movies ever made, so it’s not like I’m some weird outlier here.

Anyway, A++. In the unlikely event I make my way through this whole list, there are two more Bergman films (in addition to The Seventh Seal, down at #93) that I’ll be seeing, and I’ve got them mentally highlighted now.