The Ultimate Cinematic Bait-and-Switch: Why "Identity" is a Total Waste of Your Time

We have all been there. You spend an hour and a half deeply invested in a dark, atmospheric thriller. You analyze the clues, try to suss out the killer’s motives, and genuinely care about whether the characters survive the night. Then, the writer pulls the rug out from under you—not with a clever twist, but with a cheap narrative eviction notice.

I am talking, of course, about the 2003 psychological thriller Identity.

On paper, it sounds like an absolute masterclass in tension: ten strangers are stranded at a remote Nevada motel during a torrential downpour, completely cut off from the outside world. Suddenly, they start getting brutally murdered one by one. It feels like an edgy, modern homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

Except it isn't. Because halfway through, the movie hits you with a revelation that completely destroys everything that came before it: none of these characters are real.

The Cheat Code of Screenwriting

Let’s look at why this twist is a massive, insulting waste of your time.

The film reveals that the entire motel sequence is actually taking place entirely inside the mind of Malcolm Rivers, a serial killer suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). The ten strangers aren't real people; they are his ten distinct personalities. The "murders" are just his subconscious mind trying to execute the homicidal personality before his execution hearing.

This is the ultimate screenwriting cheat code. It is the cinematic equivalent of waking up and realizing "it was all a dream."

The moment a filmmaker reveals that the stakes are entirely imaginary, the tension instantly evaporates. Why should I care that a character is getting stabbed behind a dumpster if that character is literally just a fragment of a killer’s imagination? There is no danger. There is no real tragedy. The blood isn't real, the motel isn't real, and the rain isn't even real. You aren't watching a high-stakes survival story; you are watching an internal corporate restructuring meeting inside a madman's brain.

A Flat-Out Retcon of Your Emotions

Good plot twists reward the audience for paying attention. When you watch a movie like The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects, the twist recontextualizes the clues you already saw, making a second viewing even more rewarding.

Identity does the exact opposite. It punishes you for paying attention. It tells you that every single second you spent trying to figure out why the characters were connected—sharing the same birthday, being named after states—was completely pointless. The film spends an hour building up a genuine emotional anchor with Ed (played by John Cusack), an ex-cop looking for redemption, only to casually tap you on the shoulder and say, "Hey, by the way, that guy doesn't exist. He’s just a symptom."

It is a lazy, cynical way to resolve a murder mystery. The writers clearly couldn't figure out a logical, real-world way to tie up the complex whodunit they created, so they simply hit the reset button and blamed it on a psychological disorder.

The Verdict: Give Me My 90 Minutes Back

Identity operates on a fundamentally flawed premise: that a twist is good simply because it is shocking. But a twist shouldn't just surprise the audience; it has to respect the audience's time.

By dissolving its entire cast into a collection of psychological tropes, Identity reduces a gritty, promising thriller into a meaningless mental exercise. If you haven't seen it, save yourself the frustration. If you have, you already know the profound annoyance of realizing you just spent 90 minutes watching a movie about absolutely nobody.