movies with conclusions which undercut the rest of the movie

I'm always all over the place and I often get frustrated with a situation or myself and then get flustered. I read your response as "I haven't seen it 17 times" thinking you were mocking my love of the movie. Don't know how I made that mistake.

The first set of pictures are of his mother who was a whore, a child abuser and a drug addict who left his abandoned at a motel when he was a child. This is the trauma that caused his DID. He was in foster care and a ward of the state throughout his teenage years. The crime he was convicted of was killing 6 people at an apartment complex 4 years prior to the opening scene of the movie. All stabbed to death. There are then pictures shown of these victims and I guess they do have similar clothes as some of the people at the motel. The screenwriter and director are probably hoping you forget some of that info as the movie goes on. It is shown very quickly too. This both goes to what you were thinking was going on and more foreshadowing to the twist.

The reason this is difficult is because I am trying to remember what I thought on initial viewing 17 years ago. Give me a little leeway here. I might have thought at first that the motel stuff was about what happened involving the actual murders, but then I think things started to feel a bit fishy the more I thought about it. Such as a storm happening in both parts of the story. James Mangold intentionally makes it feel like it is all happening at the same time. All this is intended to confuse things and I felt there was something else going on and it had me fascinated as to what it was. 

I also found it fishy that there is already a dangerous criminal brought to the hotel. That was another reason I didn't think the motel stuff was showing back to when Malcolm committed the murders. The movie is set up as a who-done-it and that wouldn't have worked if we assumed Malcolm was committing all of the murders at the motel. None of it was adding up to me.