Did anyone else just burst out laughing at the twist?

I agree. Terrible, terrible twist ending.

I would not recommend this movie.....once the bodies disappeared I just started saying oooh nooo....and sure it was downhill from there...they should have just made it a damn ghost movie and somehow just made it a haunted motel

I'm with you man. This is a movie that tried to be twisty and clever, and ended up being lame.
waste of time.

[deleted]

Here's the thing about this movie. As entertainment, it was fine, and if you accept the premise (granting that it takes some fairly severe liberties with how D.I.D. actually works in the real world, especially given that D.I.D.'s very existence is still highly controversial) the movie's plot makes perfect sense. It's tight enough that there's no cause for legitimate complaint there. The first "twist" was obviously intended to be seen ahead of time, thanks to the structure. These are not subtle clues being dropped, after all -- they're entire scenes alternating between two completely different vistas (the doctor/courthouse and the motel/desert.) Feeling clever, or disparaging the writing, because you saw that one coming is just silly. They wanted you to see it coming in order to put you at ease before the real twist (the boy surviving and turning out to be the killer.) Once again, the internal logic is fine -- the mental terrain obviously allows the personalities to take liberties with physics that you can't take in the real world. There's no problem with that, since imagination isn't bound by the strict rules of external physical behavior. So the kid can survive and commit some fairly brutal killings despite being a kid (and for those of you who laugh at the idea of a kid being a psychotic killer, well...I can only assume you have little experience with kids. Kids can be very good people, of course, but they can also border on complete selfishness and amorality.)

The real weakness of this film, and the thing that keeps it from being an instant classic, isn't the twists or the premise. The real weakness is the lack of expository depth. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief at the premise. I'm less willing to accept the various aspects of the mindscape that don't have any obvious rationalizations. For instance, the rationale behind various aspects of the backstories of the personalities is never explored. Why does the faux-manager find a body and freeze it and create an entire backstory? It explains his presence, to be sure, but it demands further exposition in terms of the premise itself. Without an explanation of how that fits into the gathering of personalities, or what the backstory represents, it's essentially a random bit of plot. The two convicts murdering their transporter also falls into this problematic aspect of the narrative. Why are specific backstories developed here? Why does the original Malcolm personality (the kid) develop a family unit of a stepfather and a mother when the prostitute represents his actual mother? (Actually, that seems like a wish-fulfillment fantasy, so perhaps that one makes sense.) As it stands, most of the backstories seem like a (pointless) mislead before the first twist. It's all well and good to know that Ed let a girl commit suicide, but it is essentially irrational in the context of the premise that these personalities represent (what? various aspects of Malcolm?) divergences that need to be killed off. Malcolm is developing a rich fantasy world in his head there, but since he's not "in control" per se (else he'd just be able to kill them all off in one fell swoop rather than acting out the murders) it begs for a theoretical underpinning that justifies everything that happens. Essentially, the film-makers were enamored of the premise, but weren't smart enough, or perhaps just not diligent enough, to layer the premise in such a way that everything that happens, including the backstories, make perfect sense in retrospect.

That said, I still enjoy the movie. It just doesn't bear too much intensive analysis.

It's not much of a twist, when it was foreshadowed so much. The kid at the end though, that was more of a twist, made me giggle...

[deleted]

Yes, the twist ending is lame but it is overall quite suspenseful.