Northwest Film Forum

Inspired by the paranoid visions of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds and the black-and-white beauty of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another, Suture is one of the great feature debuts — by writer-directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee — and a unique piece of the 90s American independent cinema that’s ripe for rediscovery.
 
The wealthy and self-assured Vincent (Michael Harris) meets his blue-collar half-brother Clay (Dennis Haysbert) at their father’s funeral, and is struck by their similarity. He forms a plot to murder Clay and assume his identity, but Clay survives the assassination attempt with no memory and becomes mistaken for Vincent. The fact that Harris is white-skinned and Haysbert is black is only the first complication in an endlessly inventive thriller that probes the nature of identity.