If you decide to watch this film, read through the summary on IMDb first. While this summary does help to explain what you're seeing (and you DO need this),it also praises the film for not relying on intertitle cards. I totally disagree...a few would have helped explain the action, as without the summary much of it just wouldn't make sense. As it is, the film ALREADY is confusing and strange.

The style of "A Page of Madness" is uniquely strange. It's a Japanese silent film which reminds me a bit of the German Expressionist film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"--but not nearly so strange and stylized. Instead, the film relies on fast intercutting of symbols and shapes to provide the odd style for the movie. It also is a bit reminiscent of the American horror film "Freaks" as it tries to evoke a strong reaction in the viewer as they're exposed to insane folks WILDLY overacting and overdoing the whole crazy bit. To me, it makes for an oddly interesting art film but not much more. It's certainly NOT a film to appeal to mass audiences as they wouldn't sit still for such a vague and bizarro film.

As for the plot, I'll have to assume the one on IMDb is correct. I couldn't exactly tell what was happening but the summary did make the film make sense.

Most of the film takes place in an asylum. We focus on patients who do repetitive act, losing their connection with reality. We also see a kind of tribalism that gut wrenching. A man who has made the mistake of sending his wife to this asylum decides he needs to get her out. If her mind was not gone when she came in, it has been severely damaged while she has been incarcerated. Not a film for everyone. Unique in its surrealism for Japan in 1926. Claustrophobic, to say the least.

Silent film about a husband deeply tormented by his actions towards his wife (domestic abuse that caused her to go mad) is a knockout. Directed by Kinugasa in a hallucinogenic, surreal style, the visually odd nature of the film depicts (or we are led to believe) an insane asylum housing the mentally unwell wife with her husband (sorrowful for what he did to her) taking a menial job at the place to be near her. The way the mad in the asylum are filmed, the director applies a narrative without titles to tell us what is going on, instead opting for us to determine that for ourselves. Overlapping images, stark use of black and white lensing, radically challenging angled depictions of the patients, and alternating trips into the real and unreal depending on where the protagonist's head is at, the idea of rescuing his wife from the asylum that is now her home becomes bleaker as the film continues. The insane damned to spend their lives in a place that serves as a type of prison are often deliriously photographed in a barrage of startlingly bleak images and its an experimental avante garde style, often quite unsettling and tragic. Unforgettable is the film's presentation. This will be certain to leave many viewers frustrated and the nature of its storytelling is difficult...just to kind of give you a head's up.