Rent Suture (1993)

Identity Theft. - Suture review by Steve

It's natural for new directors to explore their influences. On the disc extras Scott McGehee and David Siegel acknowledge a debt to '60s Japanese sci-fi and the script actually lifts a long speech from Double Indemnity (1944). The story is classic noir, with a wealthy man accused of murder who plots the fiery death of a lookalike, then disappears...

So it's arthouse but also draws on old Hollywood. The patsy (Dennis Haybert) is pulled out of the car wreckage with amnesia. As he recovers, the plastic surgeon and psychoanalyst try to modify him into the person they presume he is- which is the murderer (Michael Harris). Which is a doozy of a plot twist, but once again, has been done before.

What's new is the gimmick of casting black and white actors as the two similar looking men. This opens up some subtext about race, but really doesn't squeeze the possibilities all that hard. It's mainly a curiosity, which draws the ambience into the zone of modernist writers, most ostentatiously like Paul Auster. Maybe this sounds pretentious...

But for genre enthusiasts, it's a whole lot of fun. Of course, it's in b&w, but more like '60s arthouse sci-fi/horror than classic noir; there's a buzzy, shadowless pallor which evokes those films which represent the antiseptic whiteness of hospitals as sinister, like Eyes Without a Face (1960). It's a low budget paranoia thriller with a loyal cult following.