Editor's note: This is a nostalgic theater.

"One dark rainy night, Xiaomei ran embarrassingly in the heavy rain in a convertible car, drenched all over. The rain was getting heavier and heavier, and the car was soaked and parked on the side of the road. When she was at a loss, Xiaoshuai drove by. Mei hurriedly asked for help. But in fact, Xiaomei's real identity is a call girl who specializes in taking clients' belongings, while Xiaoshuai is a personal assistant of a female celebrity. ...The river formed by the heavy rain blocked the road and also blocked the communication. The two could only return to a small hotel to avoid the rain. In this hotel, all kinds of guests gradually gathered. What the 10 people didn't know was that, A mysterious murder is about to be staged..."

Deadly ID poster

According to the popular repost video style nowadays, "Fatal ID" can probably be accompanied by such a narration commentary, and then take a title of "Multiple flips, extreme brain-burning, you can't guess the ending if you don't see the end", and then let everyone click. A quick and effective delivery that just sort of wastes all the glamor this film should have.

Released in April 2003, this American film is not the work of a well-known screenwriter. The main actors are probably only two male protagonists who can be regarded as familiar faces that the audience can recognize. It may be worth mentioning that the director James Mangold has filmed "Speed Car King" and "Wolverine 3" in recent years, and he can only be regarded as an excellent director of commercial films in Hollywood.

All in all, this is a film that is not particularly brilliant from the production team to the shooting method, but 800,000 people on Douban have given it a high score of 8.9, and it is still ranked 92 among the top 250 Douban movies.

An excellent low-budget American thriller, it looks very conventional, even after twenty years, it will feel a bit old-fashioned, but it has its own unique charm that can span time, even if all the suspense cards are revealed. After opening it, I still feel that the film as a whole is very interesting.

The two leading actors in this film, John Cusack and Ray Liotta, are probably not many familiar faces. It's a low-budget movie without a big star.

The main plot of the film-10 mysterious guests are trapped in a place similar to an isolated island, and the murderer is among them. The protagonist must act as a detective and reason to find the real murderer before everyone is killed-this story mode, of course It originated from Agatha Christie's "There Were None", which was born when mystery novels were popular in the early 20th century. Later, after World War II, Japanese-style reasoning was carried forward, and the so-called "Island Murder" and "Blizzard Mountain Villa Model" were formed. Up to now, there are many similar stories in "Detective Conan" for elementary school students, which have become novels, Common routines in animation and film and television creation. Today, many young people who are familiar with script killing offline will also give their own insights and ideas on various script games such as "Basic Reasoning" and "Change Reasoning".

The lines spoken by the characters in the film show that the screenwriter's reference for creativity comes directly from "None Survived".

The film’s hole card is actually—it’s an old movie 20 years ago, and spoilers don’t seem to be a serious crime—these murders belong to the imagination of "multiple personality patients". Therapeutic and adjudicative process for patients to get rid of multiple personalities. To put it bluntly, the murder cases are all fake, and all the dead are not real people, but fictional characters in the brain. In this way, the film initially looked like a "principal reasoning" that could conform to the logic of reality, but in the end it actually turned into a "transformation" that is nagging and unreasonable.

Stories about mental patients are a common type of suspense films. Americans have been filming them since the 1930s and 1940s. Amnesia, hypnosis, and schizophrenia are all routine cases. In the past 20 or 30 years, "multiple personality disorder" has become popular. . Including the inspiration from the documentary literature "24 Billys", many similar films have appeared not only in the United States, but also in countries all over the world. Even in addition to the strong suspenseful style, popular love themes such as Korean dramas and domestic dramas, including online novels, etc., will also be implanted with this kind of setting, and it has long become a bad old meme.

host of multiple personalities. Although it is a spoiler, the charm of this film does not lie in the story setting.

Whether it is "serial murder in a closed environment" or "multiple personalities", it is not a new theme. They might have been eye-catching 20 years ago, but even now they add up and are not the key to making a film stand out immediately. Even many Internet universities now have borrowed from "Fatal ID", which can bring out the suspense of this strong setting to a good degree, but the overall quality of the film is still mediocre, and it is not fascinating.

Although "Fatal ID" wins with strong suspense, the excellent aspects of this film are richer than the "brain burning" emphasized by many second-generation videos today, and it also goes beyond the basic plot framework mentioned above. Of course, these are the overall suspense and impressive places. The real compactness of the film lies in the fact that several groups of characters are placed in a closed drama space. The previous situation and background of each character, the current conflicts and contradictions, and the fear of the unknown make all the characters quite sensitive, and produce A high-tension drama.

What is good-looking is not killing, but "drama".

All kinds of characters constitute the main dramatic conflict of the film. They each have their own past, and they are very lively.

In the first thirty minutes, before the serial killings begin, the film presents viewers with some mind-bending episodes that are equally tense and suspenseful even when no one is dead. include:

Doctors and prosecutors sit together in meetings to wait for a judge to agree to a stay of execution for a serial killer;

A small person who can be considered as the male protagonist, the assistant of the female star, has to deal with the incident of accidentally injuring someone. Later we will know that he is also a former policeman with the ability to solve the case, and mainly plays the role of a righteous detective in the case;

The weak and helpless husband is at a loss in the face of his severely injured wife. On the one hand, he is trying to calm down his emotions, and on the other hand, he has to take care of and comfort his autistic son;

The prostitute who stole people's property and absconded, in fact, her character is not bad, a bit like a heroine;

A quarreling young couple, a bad-tempered female star, and an innkeeper who seems to be hiding some secret;

In the end, a plainclothes policeman on duty escorted a ferocious prisoner to the hotel to stay. This is the most dangerous pairing. The prisoner may escape at any time, and the policeman seems to have his own secret, and he still has a gun.

Except for the first set of plots—the audience will find out later that this is the film’s hole card, other mysterious guests constitute several basic sets of character relationships. In the process of life, any little thing may cause these strangers to have violent conflicts. Everyone has a kind or selfish attitude, or a violent or cowardly personality contradiction, or an active or evasive behavior. The basic differences in these roles will produce a lot of "conflict" scenes.

In a highly tense environment, even if the real killer is not found, various conflicts are still staged one after another, making the audience tense all the time.

In those classic American dramas, such as "Twelve Angry Men", which depicts conflicts between jurors, the audience can often see "typical Americans" who have obvious differences in identity, class, and personality, but have some excessive self-awareness. In the process of emphasizing independent personality, how to gradually move towards a situation of mutual understanding and cooperation, and create a harmonious atmosphere of team style. This is a typical routine of American drama, and it is also the most characteristic way of interpersonal interaction in American culture. In contrast, for example, in Agatha Christie's "None Survived" or "Murder on the Orient Express", even if there is a crime, the British tend to hide and lock the door by themselves, maintaining an aristocratic style alienation, rather than the more active conflict and cooperation that Americans experience.

Drama is a metaphor of real culture. Even in highly fictional crime films or even science fiction films, the way people face problems and deal with difficult problems will be similar to the current social environment. The impression of a group of Americans is always active and noisy, at least in the story of the film will look very lively.

Where there is conflict, there is also reconciliation and sacrifice. In order to make others happy, the hero chooses to disappear by himself, which is still enough to impress the audience. Even here, the audience knew that it was only the "virtual personality" who died.

"Fatal ID", the English name is actually Identity, literally translated as "identity". Hotel guests, as several victims appear one after the other, all with a mysterious set of hotel keys, gradually realize that this is a connected crime. Subsequent plots, such as chasing down the escaped prisoners, digging out the secrets of the hotel owner, and understanding that the plainclothes police are actually gangsters pretending to be police, created new combinations of cooperation and struggle among the characters, and at the same time they began to approach each other. The mystery of the whole play—everyone’s birthday is unbelievably on the same day, and unreasonable supernatural factors began to appear in the incident—it turns out that all the cases and character conflicts are fictitious, just originating from a "multiple personality" Serial Killer" imagination.

Interestingly, even if the hole cards are revealed, the story can still continue. Even if the characters are all fake, it seems that it doesn't matter who dies and who lives, but because of the previous preparation and shaping of the character's drama, the audience will still be curious about the question "who can live to the end", and wonder about "who is the real one?" Fierce" also maintained interest. In a "detective story" mode, even if it is far away from the logic of reality, there must still be a "true murderer" in the end, and the game still has to wait until he is identified before it ends.

As for this part of the content, there will be no spoilers here. Leave a little suspense for viewers who haven't seen the film.

A deadly hotel key, implying that someone will die. The god of death wants to deal you a card, and you can't dodge it no matter what.

Although there are quite a few new films at the moment, they are dubbed "script-killing" films because they contain a lot of dialogue and discussion of the characters, as well as the investigation and analysis of the murder case. It seems that it has become an interesting new model, but The "Fatal ID" 20 years ago has actually gone a long way in this regard. The film's use of layers of detective stories guides the audience even if they understand that "these are all made up", they can still play the detective game to the end, and there are some new twists and discoveries of clues in the end. Although many "script-killing" scripts nowadays have gone a long way in "constant flipping", "Fatal ID" does not have so many suspenseful flops, but because it has always maintained a good suspenseful atmosphere, the relationship between characters Again, the conflict appears believable and plausible. So it can still attract the audience to care about the fate of these characters.

On the whole, this is a movie that, although the form is quite novel, has a more solid atmosphere and "dramatic conflict". The richness of a good movie is far more than the storyline briefly described in the second biography video. Although the plot is also very important, it is the characters in the film that always impress the audience. How they behave and choose in the face of difficulties is the part that really cares.