Analysis of Identity

The opening scene opens with a voice over over black starting before a picture is shown. This creates suspense for the audience. This then cuts to a close up of the psychiatrist. The voice is of a man, Malcolm Rivers, who the psychiatrist if listening to on an examination tape. Whilst the tape is playing there are quick jump cuts to each piece of evidence, files of the murder case and old newspaper clippings revealing that there was a young boy abandoned at a hotel by his prostitute mother and how Rivers was caught, trialed and sentenced to execution. There is a sound effect of the tape being rewound whilst the pictures also change. In this scene there is a mid shot of the psychiatrist looking extremely confused by the case. Over the opening scene there is a voice over of Malcolm Rivers being questioned, throughout the interview Malcolm Rivers talks in an extremely childlike way. This gives the impression that he never had the stabilization of a childhood so he doesn't know what it is like to be an adult.


To break the interview it suddenly cuts to a phone ringing and a man who is asleep, the voice on the phone sounds very nervous and informs the man asleep and the audience that Malcolm Rivers has been let out for a re hearing the night before his execution. This makes the audience extremely nervous and the audience know that something is bound to happen which includes Malcolm Rivers. It cuts from a close up of the man asleep to a wide shot of the other man walking down a corridor.


It then cuts to an interior roadside motel and there is a lot of rain. This is pathetic fallacy, the bad weather creates the tension for the audience because usually when there is heavy rain etc. then something bad is going to happen. The manager is drinking a lot of alcohol and he is shouting at a version of countdown when a car pulls up and crashes into the motel. A man comes running in, dripping wet, carrying a women who is bleeding. This causes the audience to panic because they automatically think that Malcolm Rivers has got something to do with it.