SUTURE (Directed by Scott McGehee, David Siegel. Starring Dennis Haysbert, Mel Harris, Sab Shimono, Alice Jameson, Michael Harris)

Curiously, like Morgan Freeman’s Irish con in The Shawshank Redemption, Suture features a black actor in a white role whose colour is never remarked upon. But where colour in Shawshank is simply fudged over in misguided Hollywood liberalism, the colour of actor Dennis Haysbert is a central, alienating device in this intriguing, stylish, philosophical thriller.

Suture is a post-modern film noir, or perhaps that should be film blanc et noir. Shot in handsome cinemascope black and white, its pulpish plot revolves around standard thriller predicaments and coincidences: identical characters and convenient amnesia. Clay Arlington (Haysbert) and Vincent Towers (Michael Harris) are half brothers, who met each other for the first time at the funeral of their murdered father. The illegitimate Clay has grown up in poverty, Vincent in the lap of extreme luxury. When they get together a second time, Clay is almost murdered by a car bomb that leaves him burned, scarred and suffering from amnesia. A plastic surgeon remakes his face using images of Vincent, for whom he has been mistaken, while a policeman waits for his face to heal to put him in an identity line-up as a murder suspect. Clay is hardly in a position to argue since Vincent has disappeared, Clay himself has no idea who he is and anyway, as has already been remarked, the two brothers are strikingly similar in appearance. What goes bafflingly unremarked by any character in the film, is that Vincent is white, and Clay is black.

This curious device alerts the viewer that there is more to the mystery than meets the eye. On the surface, Suture is a paranoid hardboiled murder story but all the time issues of identity – philosophical and psychological – are thrown into relief by the deliberately inappropriate casting: the real questions of Suture are not whodunit, howdunit or whydunit but how do we know who we are? And is identity an exterior or interior concept?

If that sounds heavy going, the elaborate film-making (moving cleverly between dream and reality and smartly juxtaposing opposing scenes), witty dialogue, intriguing characters and warm performances ensures that it is not. Suture is a playful film, delivering all that is required of the genre while building layers of meaning into the fabric of the story. Clay’s blackness is a device that may keep the viewer at a distance, but intellectual stimulation provided more than compensates. This is a mystery that should keep you pondering its central questions long after it has been solved.