Identity

A B-movie with a chip on its shoulder

The new thriller Identity has an oddly familiar ring to it, and once the first few corpses start piling up, you're in no doubt about what you're seeing: this is nothing other than that time-honoured yarn in which a group of people find themselves trapped together one dark night and murdered one by one. Essentially, Identity is Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, and at one point the film brazenly admits as much. Yet from the start, there's a nagging feeling that Identity isn't just this - that it has something else on its mind as well. The flashily-cut credit sequence, in which psychiatrist Alfred Molina reviews the case of one of his patients, leads you to expect another film entirely. Then, following a bit of legal intrigue involving a Death Row prisoner, the action suddenly shifts to a motel in the middle of nowhere - and, voom, we're off into the first of a series of disorienting flashbacks.

Before long, however, things settle into a coherent and unashamedly corny situation, as the assembled cast converges at a rundown motel one dark and rain-soaked night. There's a spoilt Hollywood actress on the skids (Rebecca de Mornay) and her chauffeur (John Cusack); a generically sassy prostitute (Amanda Peet); a neurotic young couple; a nerdy family who have suffered a nasty road accident. All the roads around are cut off, the phones are dead, everyone has a dark secret, and we're clearly in for a lively night of bickering hysteria, when who should turn up but a cop (Ray Liotta) with a leering multiple murderer chained up in his car. Factor in the axiom that no one is what they seem, and you're all set for a jolly bout of one-damn-thing-after-another: a severed head in the laundry, a freak car accident, bodies appearing, bodies disappearing... And did I mention that the motel is on the site of an Indian burial ground?

You may suspect that someone is royally taking the piss. The surprising thing, however, is that Identity persuades us to take it seriously: the more implausible it gets, the more we suspect that there's some secret design behind it all, some existential deep theme beyond the gory shenanigans. But perhaps that's just because Cusack's character keeps a copy of Sartre in his glove compartment. Identity is sustained by a lingering sense that on some level it's not simply a murder mystery, but a speculation on the problems of perception, or at the very least a treatise on the self-deconstructive tendency of Hollywood thriller conventions. As a self-conscious meta-genre exercise, however, Identity is not on the brazenly cheeky send-up level of Scream, with which it shares a producer: it's rather more subtle, yet also considerably more cynical. You could be uncharitable and accuse director James Mangold of making a silly, expensive B-movie with a chip on its shoulder. Yet he has made it in a Hollywood world in which a B-movie done well is perhaps the only honourable thing for a certain kind of director to be doing. Unusually for this kind of Hollywood production, Identity makes no obvious appeal to a youth audience. With its older cast of accomplished character players, the film targets an older and choosier public; it very much intends to be perceived as a class act, a connoisseur bit of intelligent flim-flam.

The real trickery in Identity lies in Michael Cooney's devious script, and it's a film I'd happily recommend to anyone who enjoys having the wool pulled shamelessly over their eyes. And it has that rare and perfect concision, a round, no-nonsense 90 minutes. Yet I have to admit Identity worries me. It goes out of its way to flatter the viewer's intelligence, constantly slipping us the wink, defying us to figure out what's really going on; at the same time, it shows a certain contempt for the thriller genre and for itself. This film feels like a cry of despair - like those films made by extremely smart people who lament that contemporary Hollywood requires anything but smartness. (Mangold started with the worthy if stolid low-budget drama Heavy, but recently used up his critical favour with the fluffy romance Kate and Leopold). Such people, then, set their immense craft and critical brilliance to work on a subject that, under normal circumstances, they might consider unworthy of them, and erode it from within. For sure, Identity is an immensely polished package with its very adept cast, its super-sharp editing and sound design, and director of photography Phedon Papamichael rising to the visual and logistic challenge of shooting nearly an entire film in chiaroscuro under torrential rain.

As the film proceeds to its knotty conclusion, it at last reveals its big secret - only to make it rather difficult for us to understand, let alone care, what is happening in the last 10 minutes. At this point, the film seems almost to be shaking us by the lapels and screaming about how clever thrillers could be if they were only given the chance. Identity is exceptionally ingenious and yet a film in absolute bad faith, fundamentally dishonest in the games it plays. It tries so hard in its systematic self-ironising that it finally huffs and puffs and blows itself down, leaving you with a handful of narrative dust and (if you're that way inclined) quite possibly the desire to ask for your money back. Even as a sucker for ostentatiously tricksy novelty thrillers, I have to admit that Identity makes me worry whether the Hollywood thriller still has the nerve to simply be honest. Should that matter more or less than the fact that Identity is considerably wittier and more entertaining than, say, Phone Booth? Go figure.

j.romney@independent.co.uk