PERSONA

Released in Japan last summer, Persona produces chills with more contemporary means that most Japanese horror films. Instead of a mildewy samurai castle that is a cousin to Harry Potter's Hogwarts, the setting is an average Japanese high school whose students are engaged in the usual adolescent survival games. One comes up with an ingenious, if strange, counter to the bullies who make his life hell, he wears a mask to class and, emboldened by his new identity, is able to defy them. Soon other of his classmates are sporting masks that resemble the white face protectors worn by hockey goalies - and serial killers in slasher movies. This being Japan, the mask wearers quickly form a clique and throw orgiastic parties at which everyone can freely express their individuality in perfect anonymity. Inevitably, one of the mask wearers turn up dead. And inevitably, the film's female idol star, Maya Kurosu, turns investigator. With her big, glittery eyes, boyishly cut hair and sharply etched profile, Kurosu resembles a teen-aged Demi Moore, but the film's real center is the mysterious mask maker played by male idol Tatsuya Fujiwara. A close-mouthed sort, he manufactures the masks that fuel the fad - and knows more than he is telling about why some of his customers turn up dead. A love interest of sorts develops between the two principals, but goes nowhere. The focus of Persona, however, is less this zipless love story than the Sturm und Drang of Japanese adolescence, including the intense - and at times fatal - pressure to conform. A pressure that no mask yet made is big enough to withstand.