IDENTITY

Rating: 3

I suspect that IDENTITY wants to be more profound than it ultimately is. This adds a note of prissy pretension to an otherwise effective little thriller. Set on a dark and stormy night at a rundown motel situated on an Indian graveyard, screenwriter Michael Cooney toys with horror conventions but doesn’t succumb to the clichés. Sure, there’s a twitchy clerk in the motel’s office, but there are also some rather slick misdirections as well as a sense that Cooney is playing with those conventions in order to get somewhere else entirely. The which he does, though if you pay close attention to the voice on the tape at the beginning of the film, the one psychiatrist Alfred Molina is listening to so intently, and you have seen enough episodes of the original Twilight Zone, you will probably figure out where all this is going.

Not that that hinders the fun. Director James Mangold (GIRL INTERRUPTED, KATE AND LEOPOLD) has a sure touch with setting the mood at this motel of the damned where guests are dropping like flies and in ways that are not very pretty. Let’s just say the head discovered thumping away in the dryer isn’t the worst thing going on and that you will never look at a baseball bat in quite the same way again. Mangold sets that shadowy mood and times things just right so that while we know something is going to happen, we don’t quite know what or where or exactly when. This makes the jump and scream factor kick in nicely.

As for the characters who all end up trapped at the motel, they’re an interesting assortment of just plain folks, doe-eyed kids, and psycho killers, but make no assumptions about which are which. John Cusak is the most intriguing as the limo driver with secrets beneath that pensive cherub face. Ray Liotta is more obvious as a cop with his own issues as he transports a raving convict played by Jake Busey and his big scary teeth. A flintier-that-usual Amanda Peet is the most wholesome cinematic hooker since Donna Reed in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. I’m not quite sure why everyone nails her at first sight as the piece’s prostitute. She’s a little to well-scrubbed looking, especially next to Rebecca DeMornay’s faded actress, all collagen lips, inch-thick makeup, and shorter-than-short skirts over spike-heeled boots. Maybe it’s a guy thing. As for Clea DuVall as half of a forgettable newlywed couple, she’s Clea Duvall, which is to say whiny and annoying. Better is John C. McGinley, as a painfully ordinary guy with a penchant for reciting from memory instructions for the best way to do anything even while he’s avoiding a hydroplaning spin-out in the middle of a cloudburst.

Things get more peculiar as the gang’s evening progresses and their numbers dwindle with coincidences that belie simple chance and a twist that should not surprise us so much as reassure us that Cooney is playing by the rules of cohesive writing and that we’re clever for figuring it out. But Cooney doesn’t stop there. He moves on into some original territory before landing with a thud by leaving things open to a sequel.

The ending, the penultimate one that is, seems to come out of nowhere. I can’t tell you why without ruining a whole lot of surprises, but I can tell you that it pays to keep track of the numbers on the room keys that pop up on each corpse. And to remember that IDENTITY is an evening’s diversion, not a masterpiece.