Psychological Thriller

Identity (2003)

Dir. James Mangold

Written by: Michael Cooney

Starring: John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, John Hawkes

Identity has been quietly resting on my shelf for a decade, unwatched. It’s a disc that got mixed into my collection from a previous roommate at some point, and I have never had the urge to watch it. I saw Identity in the theater, with this same eventual roommate, no less, and I can remember both of us being wholly unimpressed with the movie, and with its prominent plot twist. In the years following up the success of The Sixth Sense and M. Night Shyamalan’s subsequent couple of movies, it seemed like the game-changing plot twist was the flavor of the month for Hollywood studio thrillers, and I think that some fatigue from the overwhelmingness of the trend led to my total dismissal of Identity. I largely forgot about the movie until discovering it in a box of DVDs when I moved into the house that I’ve been living in for the last six years, and in the time between then and my decision to start this project, I only thought of Identity, cursorily, as a real-life version of “The Three,” Donald Kaufman’s asinine screenplay from Adaptation. in which all three principal characters are revealed to be the same person. Since starting this project, however, Identity has loomed large in the back of my mind as a movie that I was both anticipating and dreading screening and writing about. I fully anticipated Identity to be, at best, a generic and predictable thriller not worthy of the collected talent that it assembles, and, at worst, a derivative and implausible B-movie driven by a third act plot twist it doesn’t earn. Maybe it was the low bar that I had going in, but I was pleasantly surprised by Identity, and I found most of my remembrances of it from 15 years ago to be incorrect.

Identity begins by introducing Malcolm Rivers (Pruitt Taylor Vince), an inmate set to be executed for several brutal murders. Rivers’s legal team and psychologist, Dr. Malick (Alfred Molina), file a midnight appeal for a stay of execution, arguing a legal defense of insanity citing new evidence that has come to light in the form of a diary. The midnight hearing is assembled during a tremendous storm, and begins without Malick, who is being transported from prison. At the same time, a group of ten strangers become stranded at a roadside motel, forced to bed down for the night due to the storm. They include a former cop, Ed (Cusack), who is now working as a limousine driver, a Nevada state trooper, Rhodes (Liotta), who is transporting a convicted murderer, a prostitute on her way to a new life in Florida, Paris (Peet), and the hotel’s manager, Larry (Hawkes). The group have come together in spectacularly coincidental fashion, which is shown in a flashback, involving a family getting a flat tire from striking a loose high heel that flew out of one of Paris’s suitcases. The mother, Alice (Leila Kenzle), is struck by Ed’s limousine when he is distracted by his passenger, the actress Caroline Suzanne (Rebecca de Mornay). Ed brings the injured woman to the motel in search of a working phone, and while he is trying to get help for her, the rest of the group assembles at the motel. As they realize they are stranded for the night and begin to bed down, a killer starts to pick them off one by one, leaving motel keys with the bodies, counting down from 10 to 1. The group begins a paranoid hunt for the killer, and the bodies continue to pile up in rapid fashion, while at the same time the survivors begin to discover more inexplicable coincidences, such as the fact that they all share a birthday. Meanwhile, as the competency hearing continues, and Rivers arrives, the extent of his multiple personality disorder is revealed, and it becomes apparent that the events at the motel are the representation of the psychic trauma of Rivers’s multiple identities being dragged to the surface and vying for primacy in his mind. Dr. Malick makes contact with the Ed personality and urges him to save Rivers’s life by eliminating the personality that drove him to commit the murders, and the action returns to the motel for the film’s climax.

While Identity certainly owes a massive artistic debt to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, even going so far as to obliquely reference one of the novel’s many film adaptations, it still managed to feel relatively fresh to me. While the film’s revelation that all of the characters at the motel only exist inside of Rivers’s mind is a little bit predictable, Identity still managed to largely keep me interested and on my toes. The movie brings in the twist a little too early, but it leads up to it with a series of McGuffins and red herrings that I actually found to be pretty satisfying. It’s a movie that strives towards prestige, and though it doesn’t quite achieve the level of a top thriller, it’s a workmanlike effort that I found to be much more enjoyable than I ever would have imagined. Mangold turns the desert motel into a disorienting funhouse maze, utilizing canted angles, tight shot framings around corners and down narrow hallways between the buildings, and the persistent rain and gloom, to disrupt the audience’s sense of visual continuity of space. While the mystery isn’t particularly compelling after it’s revealed that the characters are all psychic projections, up to that point, the film’s visual style and a few well-timed surprise killings had me heavily invested in discovering the killer’s identity. I had the knowledge that Ed, Rhodes, Paris, and the others are all just manifestations of Rivers’s psyche tucked away in the back of my mind, but the taut editing and brisk storytelling of the first segment at the motel all but made me forget that the reveal was coming.

The film’s cast, which is surprisingly stacked for a movie of this sort, also does a lot of heavy lifting in making Identity a more successful film than it otherwise might have been. I don’t think that either Cusack or Liotta, who are the leads of this deep ensemble, are particularly inspired in their performances. Both of them are as solid as they typically are, but neither really brings much new to the table, either. The supporting cast, however, comes on strongly, with Peet doing a nice job of maximizing her role as the film’s third lead. She’s steely and resilient, managing to give some depth to a character that is probably a bit underwritten. We don’t get many specific details about Paris’s back story, but Peet’s performance gives hints towards the type of life that she’s running from. John Hawkes, who I had completely forgotten was in the movie, is the real gem in the supporting cast, though. While his character seems at first to be relegated to a comic relief role, his story is fleshed out and given a surprisingly dark makeover halfway through the film, and the shift in how the audience perceives his character from that point is a testament to Hawks’s versatility as an actor. He goes from being agitated and put-upon to eluding a quiet menace after it’s revealed that he isn’t actually the hotel manager, but that he found the manager dead one day and assumed his responsibilities while hiding his body in the freezer. All the while, though, he imbues Larry with the sympathy-evoking beaten dog qualities that are so common in Hawkes’s characters. The strong assemblage of veteran character actors that round out the cast, and the A-list stars in the film, help lift it above genre material and convincingly sell a movie that might otherwise have collapsed under the weight of a less-than-novel structure and narrative contrivance.

I was actually really satisfied that I found myself to be a bigger fan of Identity that I had expected. I’ve written before that I don’t particularly enjoy writing about movies that I don’t like and that I find it difficult to produce quality writing about films that I don’t think are of a very high quality. I was totally psyched up to write about how much I hated Identity, but, luckily, I was able to avoid that and instead write about what a pleasant surprise it was that this movie wasn’t total trash. Of course the movie has its faults. It really is fairly predictable, with its major twist being telegraphed from the beginning, but it packs in enough genuine surprises along the way that it makes up for the larger lack of mystery surrounding its central narrative. I don’t see myself returning to Identity anytime soon, and I wouldn’t really recommend that anyone go out of their way to see it, because it really is a pretty paint-by-numbers example of a thriller, but it’s a decent enough diversion. It’s the sort of movie that if I caught it on basic cable in another decade I would probably have forgotten about all over again, but I guess that could make the rediscovery that much more satisfying. There’s not anything being offered here that hasn’t been done before, and probably done better, as well, but the cast is solid and the atmospherics are actually quite well done. Identity isn’t the sort of twist movie that requires a lot of active thinking or reflection on the part of its audience, but it’s an entertaining enough ride if you want to turn your brain off for a while.

Don’t Say a Word (2001)

Dir. Gary Fleder

Written by: Anthony Peckham & Patrick Smith Kelley (from the novel by Andrew Klavan)

Starring: Michael Douglas, Brittany Murphy, Sean Bean

I had to write my review of Don’t Say a Word almost immediately after screening the movie, because it is a truly unremarkable and unmemorable film. The movie is the type of paint-by-numbers studio fare that I typically avoid, but somehow this disc ended up in my collection. It isn’t really my movie, having gotten mixed into my DVDs at some point when, I assume, a friend let one of my roommates borrow it sometime. The case has sat on my shelf for over a decade, mixed in among other movies that I’ve loved and watched many times over the years, and I’ve never had the impulse to take it out of the case and watch it until this morning. I have to say that my reticence to watch Don’t Say a Word was probably wise, as it provided an entertaining enough, though thoroughly uninspired couple of hours. Don’t Say a Word isn’t a terrible movie, but its familiar plot has been spun out in better, more original ways more than once.

Don’t Say a Word opens in 1991, with an exciting bank robbery scene, in which a gang makes off with a rare $10 million dollar ruby. However, in the chaos of the aftermath of the robbery, two members of the gang are able to double cross their leader, Patrick (Bean), and make off with the precious jewel, leaving him holding a worthless bracelet. The film then jumps forward ten years, introducing Dr. Nathan Conrad, a child psychologist who has been asked to work with a disturbed teenage girl, Elisabeth (Murphy), who witnessed her father’s murder as a child. Meanwhile, Patrick and his gang are released from jail, and are hell bent on finding the stolen ruby. The gang set up shop in an apartment above Dr. Conrad’s apartment, and proceed to surveille him and his family, before abducting his daughter. Patrick contacts Dr. Conrad and informs him that he has little time to save his daughter’s life, and that the only way to do so is to extract a six digit number that Elisabeth has locked in her repressed memories. It is subsequently revealed that Elisabeth’s murdered father was the member of Patrick’s gang who double crossed him, and that he hid the ruby in Elisabeth’s favorite doll for safe keeping. While Dr. Conrad attempts to crack the safe that is Elisabeth’s mind, a police detective (Jennifer Esposito) is tracking Patrick in connection with a string of grisly murders. Their trails all dovetail at the film’s climax, which occurs in a pauper’s graveyard on Hart Island.

The film starts out promisingly enough. The opening heist scene is exciting, and though its rather conventionally blocked out and shot, it still provides an initial rush that propels the first quarter of the movie. However, when the film starts to downshift and introduce its psychological thriller components, it becomes a bogged down game of cat and mouse. Fleder tries to use dark settings-cemeteries, crumbling state-run mental hospitals-to give the film an eerie undercurrent, but these window dressings rarely serve to distract from the fact that what he’s presenting is largely a cookie cutter ransom film, with few points of specificity to set it aside from the rest of its ilk. The film takes very predictable courses to bringing Conrad and Patrick together for a confrontation, and hits on all the familiar tropes along the way. Even the film’s supposed twists, whether it be the fact that the kidnappers were in the apartment building all along or that Elisabeth’s murdered father was a member of Patrick’s gang, are easy to see coming a mile away. The film features a handful of action set pieces that should help to break up the monotony of its cardboard plot, but none of them are particularly memorable.

The performances are workmanlike throughout, with a pretty good cast having been assembled. No one is doing his or her best work in Don’t Say a Word, but the film doesn’t suffer from poor performances in any way. Douglas is fine as the distressed father, but his performance lacks any sort of immediacy. I felt that he was far more hell bent on getting to work in Falling Down than he ever was on rescuing his young daughter in this film. Bean is probably the star of the show, using his minimal screen time to great effect. He’s particularly effective as a chillingly calm and menacing voice over the phone, giving both Conrad and his wife, Aggie (Famke Janssen), cold instruction.

I do think that the film is to be credited for featuring several strong performances by women and giving its female characters prominent roles. Aggie is bedridden for much of the film, suffering a broken leg in a skiing accident, but when she does get the opportunity to rise and get involved in the action, Janssen delivers ably. She has one of the film’s best fight scenes, viciously dispatching of one of the kidnappers who attempts to snuff her out. Jennifer Esposito does the best that she can with the little amount of screen time and exposition afforded to her character. She plays Detective Cassidy as a tough, no-nonsense cop, and even though her character is an obvious caricature, Detective Cassidy is presented in a more positive light than her male counterparts, who are shown to ineffective, lazy, or both. Finally, Brittany Murphy shines in the movie in a role that she was likely pigeonholed into. Though she spent much of her too short career being typecast in just these sorts of roles, women with psychological issues in crisis, she never failed to deliver compelling, nuanced performances. As might be expected, much of her work in Don’t Say a Word is nonverbal, and she builds a performance on the tics and physical compulsions that drive her character. The film doesn’t have the most progressive view of mental illness, but Murphy’s performance does a lot to soften its rough edges. Her gentleness and longing help to humanize her character and give the film what emotional depth it does have.

Overall, Don’t Say a Word isn’t a bad movie. It’s serviceable in all the ways that it should be, but it lacks any real dynamism, and it’s far too predictable to stand out in a crowded field of similar thrillers. In fact, it serves as a good reminder for me of why I tend to avoid these types of mainstream thrillers. They’re often so derivative that it’s difficult to distinguish one from another. The film’s cast does what they can to elevate the material, but the talented actors just aren’t given a great deal to work with. Fleder shows some flashes of compelling action filmmaking throughout, but rarely carries these over to the film as a whole, leaving the project feeling uninspired. This is probably the first unequivocally negative review that I’ve written so far for this project, and it likely isn’t a surprise that the first film that I’m reviewing that isn’t actually “mine,” in the sense that I didn’t purchase it or choose it to be a part of my collection. I was hoping that I would be pleasantly surprised by Don’t Say a Word, but there just isn’t enough there to make me desire a second viewing. If you’re in the mood for a psychological thriller, there are plenty of better choices.

Drew's DVD Project

12 Monkeys to Zodiac

Identity

Don’t Say A Word