A Page of Madness (1926)

I'll be straight with you: I did not enjoy this. Not even a little. A Page of Madness is one of those films that gets held up as a landmark of world cinema, and I understand why scholars treasure it, but sitting down to actually watch the thing is a genuinely miserable experience. Half a star, and I'm being generous.

Let's start with the print itself, because you can't really discuss anything else without addressing it. What survives is grainy, damaged and frequently so murky that you're squinting at the screen trying to work out what you're even looking at. That's not me being impatient with the demands of silent cinema. I've happily spent time with The Docks of New York (1928), and that film communicates beautifully despite its age. The condition of this print goes well beyond the usual wear and tear of a century-old film. It genuinely obstructs the viewing experience at a basic, fundamental level.

Then there's the intertitle problem. The original titles were lost entirely, and whatever reconstruction exists is speculative at best. So you're watching a film with no reliable verbal guidance, no narrative signposting, no way of knowing who these people are or why you should care what happens to them. Now, I know what you're thinking: plenty of great silent films operate on pure image and emotion. But those films are built to carry that weight. This one, stripped of its original structure, just drifts.

The film is trying to depict mental illness through surreal imagery, and in 1926 that ambition was genuinely bold. Masked dancers, fragmented flashbacks, disorienting cuts between states of mind and memory. On paper, that sounds fascinating. In practice, without any rhythm or context holding it together, the sequences feel random rather than revelatory. There's no anchor. No character to latch onto. Just a swirl of abstract imagery that accumulates without purpose or release. It's one thing to disorient your audience deliberately. It's another to leave them with nothing to hold on to at all.

I've read that the screenplay was co-written by Yasunari Kawabata, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. I believe it. There's clearly an intelligence behind the project, a genuine attempt to push the language of cinema somewhere new. But good intentions and historical significance don't make a film watchable, and this one, in the state it exists today, simply isn't. The exaggerated performance style and static camerawork are par for the course in silent cinema, but even within those conventions, the film feels impenetrable rather than immersive. It's not haunting. It's not poetic. It's alienating in a way that feels accidental rather than purposeful, and tedious in a way that no film, experimental or otherwise, should be.

I do think Japanese cinema of this era and beyond has produced some genuinely extraordinary work. I found The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959) compelling precisely because it commits so fully to its atmosphere and lets you in. A Page of Madness keeps you at arm's length throughout, and not in a way that rewards patience.

There's an argument, I suppose, that experiencing the film is worthwhile purely as a historical artefact, a glimpse at where Japanese avant-garde filmmaking was headed in the silent era. If you're a film scholar or a dedicated cinephile working through the canon systematically, maybe that context makes it worth ninety minutes of your time. But for anyone coming to this as a curious viewer hoping to be moved, challenged, or even simply engaged? I'd steer well clear. This is archival material, not cinema in any living sense. Leave it to the academics.

Half a star.

Rating: ½  | Year: 1926  | Watched: 2026-04-16

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon US

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More from Japan: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · Blue (1993) · The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
More from the 1920s: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928) · A Throw of Dice (1929)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
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