Usual Suspects - 30 Years Later

 Thirty years ago, an independent film screened at the Sundance Film Festival blew our minds, and it did so in a way few if any films had ever done before.

Who is Keyser Soze?

I can still recall the first time I watched the film, not in a theater but on a DVD because I was living in Taiwan at the time and had missed the original hype of the film. Actually, I imagine quite a few people didn't catch it in theaters, but caught up later when the whisperings began. "Have you seen The Usual Suspects?" It wouldn't go much further than that because no one wanted to give anything away. "You just have to see it," they'd add.

When the film ended, there was a collective pause as everyone sat stunned, still trying to process what just happened in the ending of all endings. And now 30 years later, many of us are still trying to process exactly what happened. Who truly is Keyser Soze? Is anyone truly Keyser Soze? 

Of course, the clear and obvious answer is that, yes, Verbal Kint is and was the phantom all along. However, it's worth noting that the writer and director have both at various times suggested variations on that interpretation and implied "They are all Keyeser Soze."

So we know that Verbal is Soze, that he was the mastermind behind the film’s events, and he killed the other four criminals and numerous other people over the course of the narrative. “Kobayashi,” presumably, really was Verbal/Keyser’s lawyer, although that wasn’t really his name.

But the question to ask is, if the story Verbal told wasn’t true, then what is true?

That’s mostly ambiguous, although we know that the different characters in the lineup really did exist, and die, and the different crimes — the New York’s Finest Taxi service robbery, and later the boat explosion — happened in some form. It would appear that the whole purpose of allowing himself to be arrested and interrogated was to convince Kujan that Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) was really Keyser Soze.

Regardless, I can say after rewatching the film noir masterpiece recently that, unlike so many films and television shows, that movie holds up. It's still wildly entertaining, and it remains "endlessly watchable."