Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
You think I don’t understand the hopeless dream of being— not seeming to be, but being. The chasm between what you are to others and what you are to yourself... the feeling of vertigo, and the constant hunger to be unmasked once and for all. To be seen through, cut down, perhaps even annihilated. Every inflection a lie, every gesture a falsehood, every smile a grimace. Commit suicide? No, too vulgar. One doesn’t do things like that. But you can refuse to move or talk. You can cut yourself off, close yourself in.
Splintering of subjectivity, the fragility of the psyche, its malleability, the haunting realisation that it can shift as easily as sand, fragment itself into another, evading your notice, your control. To grasp onto identity as though it were living. Impossible. To see it splinter and dislocate itself, to look on at the shattered pieces, to be responsible for them though you know not how they came to fracture in the first place. I’m cold and rotten and indifferent. Afraid of pain afraid of dying. To choose silence, indifference, apathy. In the knowledge that your inflections, gestures, words, can never be pure, can never replicate exactly what it is your soul feels. Serenity can be found only in silence, in solitude. Voiceless utterances, the bliss of inaction in place of the clutter of meaningless words.
Persona is a tragically strung sequence of disharmony and alienation, a rumination on human subjectivity and psychology. We are beings of perception, cannot escape the seeing and being seen; this is wherein our torment lies, this is where the self splinters and we are forced to look upon our psyche in its naked and exposed state. Must we know ourselves? Can we?
All the anxiety we carry within us, all our thwarted dreams, the inexplicable cruelty, our fear of extinction, the painful insight into our earthly condition, have slowly crystallised our hope for an other-worldly salvation. The tremendous cry of our faith and doubt against the darkness and silence is the most terrifying proof of our abandonment and our unuttered knowledge.