Identity

James Mangold’s film was built almost entirely inside a studio. A motel with a swimming pool, 14 rooms and the surrounding desert went up on Stage 27 at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, with the rain supplied by rigs running continuously. Mangold says they built 95 percent of what you see, and that shooting nights in rain on location is brutal. The choice carries the film’s enclosure: there is no outside, because no outside was ever filmed. Michael Cooney’s screenplay takes the structure of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel And Then There Were None, which Mangold describes as pushed all the way up into noir. The first half of the 90 minutes builds that counting game and the second half moves into another genre, which is why the film plays as two pieces. Mark Friedberg designed it, and exteriors took the crew to the Four Aces movie ranch in Palmdale. It opened to 16.2 million dollars in 2,733 theatres against a 28 million dollar budget and made 90.3 million worldwide. A good fit if you do not mind a mystery stepping out of its own genre at the midpoint and announcing that it has. Not for anyone who cannot carry mental illness turned into a solving device; the film never returns to that choice once it makes the diagnosis.