Identity: Critic Reviews

Delighting in his own considerable cleverness and cineast's knowledge of movie history, Mangold shuffles the elements like a three-card-monte pro.

The apparent premise, creaky though it may be, holds ample opportunity for suspense and second-guessing, and Mr. Mangold handles the revelations and reversals of Michael Cooney's script with nerve-racking aplomb.

With moments of mind-bending creepiness, the film has potential, but eventually it devolves into merely a head-scratcher.

It's not art, but it's fun artfully done.

Give the film the credit it earns for playing the game well and truly.

It's an exasperating exercise in B-movie hokum and screenwriter's gimmickry.

A nihilist project in Usual Suspects mode: Nothing is as it seems, because nothing matters in the least.

I think it's a fascinating movie that, if you are able to make the leap it asks of you at about the three-quarter mark, will give you something to think and talk about for days.

This isn't a story: It's a catalog of gruesome murders.

Effective, well-crafted chiller.

A film that is thiiiis close to nailing the whole suspense/thriller/ serial-killer genre.

The director, James Mangold, and the writer, Michael Cooney, play fair, sort of, and once you understand their thinking you can trace back through the movie and see that they never cheated, exactly.

It's a relentlessly tricky and scary show, with a bit more plot and humanity than this kind of modern Grand Guignol usually gives us.

An effectively scary, psychological variation on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.

It starts as Agatha Christie but mutates into Stephen King.

It isn't a standard slasher flick, but it impersonates one for so long you want to slap it around.

It's a fun, raucous ride, with more than its share of chills and thrills.

A lame-brained nut job in search of an identity of its own.

A genuinely cunning psychological thriller.

Adds an interesting shot of intelligence to a genre that hasn't seen any in many a year.

Assorted examples of artificially flavoured humanity ... proceed to panic, bicker and run with the customary perversity that characters in situations like this do toward their gory destinies.

Opens with its mind nicely intact, suffers a major crisis about 30 minutes in, then bad turns to worse.