Review: Identity (2003)

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James Mangold’s Identity is the most 2003 coded film imaginable. I don’t mean this as a criticism, merely as a description. The film weds the Hollywood sheen of a pre-franchise era with the convoluted storytelling of the post-The Usual Suspects indie movement, all delivered by a stacked cast of Hollywood stars and That Guys. It is preposterous, but always entertaining, largely because it has one of the most ludicrous endings of any movie ever (which we’ll get to in a bit).

The set-up is a classic whodunnit: 10 strangers are holed up in a crappy motel in the desert during an unrelenting rainstorm, and are slowly dispatched by a mysterious stranger one by one. John Cusack’s LA cop-turned-limo driver is the ostensible lead, but there is also Ray Liotta as the crusty cop transporting Jake Busey’s psychotic killer, Amanda Peet as a hooker with a heart of gold, John Hawkes as the dirtbag motel manager, Rebecca DeMornay as a washed up TV actress, Clea DuVall and William Lee Scott as bickering newlyweds, and John C. McGinley, Leila Kenzle, and Bret Loehr as a dorky all-American family.

The setting is wonderfully cinematic: the decrepit motel makes the Bates Motel feel cosy and the constant downpour makes you think that the forest in Rashomon might help you get dry. Every rusty gate, every creepy boiler room, every mysterious dryer tumbling away in the dark is a harbinger of potential threat. Mangold, who is perhaps the Hollywood journeyman-par-excellance of the 21st century, has fun with mining visual tension at every turn, using the pathetic fallacy of the setting to amplify the feeling that something is not quite right here.

And something isn’t right. One by one, these strangers are killed in bizarre ways. Characters are beheaded or savagely beaten or burned to a crisp. The level of violence is startling for a mainstream Hollywood thriller (and not some entry in the Saw series that would launch the following year). Who could be behind it? That’s the mystery, but Mangold and writer Michael Cooney tip their hand that the resolution will be anything but ordinary.

Apologies to anyone bothered by spoilers for a 22-year-old movie, but we need to tackle the ending head on. The first thing to note is that the ending being convoluted is not a dealbreaker by any means. The resolutions of whodunnits are typically convoluted, as anyone who has read an Agatha Christie book can attest to. Furthermore, whodunnits seem to operate on games of oneupmanship and authorial cleverness. The subversion of expectations and the outdoing of previous works seems as much an operative function of whodunnits as generic payoffs. And so while the ending of Identity is not straightforward, it is entirely within the realms of the whodunnit genre, pulling out the ultimate resolution that seemingly thinks it never can be outdone: what if it’s not only that one of the characters is crazy, but that all the characters don’t actually exist! What if the characters are merely the alternate personalities of a killer diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder)?

This is the resolution of Identity, as we learn that a killer played by Pruitt Taylor Vince, only glimpsed in little cutaway bits, is actually all the characters: the motel is a merely psychological scenario concocted by his psychiatrist (Alfred Molina) to expose which personality is the killer’s true one and to demonstrate to the judge that the killer should not be executed as planned.

It’s a completely ludicrous resolution that is nevertheless hilariously appealing because of how much it exemplifies this period of thriller moviemaking. It’s as if Mangold and team thought the ending reveal of The Usual Suspects could be amplified, or that Fight Club would be more engaging if all the characters were Tyler Durden. It also seems to take the twist of Psycho to all new heights. But Identity doesn’t even rest once it reveals the fictitiousness of its scenario to its audience. Like an old horror movie or giallo, Identity has to pull out a final reveal where our supposed identification of the killer personality was wrong, and it was, in fact, the character we never suspected: the boy!

Identity is shameless, but so committed to its absurd scenario, from the endless rain of the delusional motel to the pontificating of Molina’s psychiatrist, that it’s hard not to be impressed, even as you acknowledge the stupidity. This is pure Hollywood hokum of a specific 2003 vintage such that I cannot help but enjoy its pretension and absurdity.

6 out of 10

Identity (2003, USA)

Directed by James Mangold; written by Michael Cooney; starring John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina, Clea DuVall, Rebecca De Mornay, John Hawkes, John C. McGinley, William Lee Scott, Jake Busey, Pruitt Taylor Vince.

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