AllMovie

Suture feels like a collaboration between Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock, filtered through Jean-Paul Sartre and Chris Marker. While the filmmakers would probably take that as a compliment, many viewers may be turned off by the pretentious trappings of an otherwise old-fashioned identity-switch story. Suture certainly has a fabulous look. The black-and-white cinematography helps sell the theme of the fluidity of personal identity, as does the casting of a white actor and a black actor as look-alike half brothers. The fault in the screenplay is that Suture puts forth as text what Hitchcock and Highsmith in Strangers on a Train kept as subtext. Not for a minute do these characters seem like real people, and the film ends up playing more like a Philosophy 101 lecture than as a satisfying thriller. This same problem would occur again in the next film made by co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, The Deep End. The duo have a great eye, and they get good work from actors, but Suture leaves the viewer with the feeling that it is something less than the sum of its parts.