I may not always love his films, but I do love that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan continues making movies that people either embrace or reject with such fervor that you almost wonder how many puppies he actually did kill (the answer, I’m guessing, is None; calm down, people). Perhaps audience and critical reaction is so strong because Shyamalan came right out of the gate being compared to some of the modern greats, like Spielberg. That’s not exactly his fault, but when did that ever stop anyone. Which is not to say that the director of THE SIXTH SENSE, UNBREAKABLE, SIGNS, and most recently THE VISIT hasn’t made his share of horrible movies (no need to list those…THE HAPPENING, THE LAST AIRBENDER, oh, I’ve said too much!).
His latest is a fun, crazy psychological horror work called SPLIT, concerning a man named Kevin (James McAvoy), who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which results in his having 24 distinct personalities that surface at various intervals. One of them, Dennis, kidnaps three teen girls and takes them to an underground lair where he says he’s preparing them for something called “The Beast,” which they assume means that their demise is imminent, and they look for any way to get out or get help.
If nothing else, Shyamalan is a master of patience and pacing. He slowly pulls his story back to reveal different areas of this subterranean prison, so we have a clearer picture of what the girls are up against. But he also pulls back on Kevin’s world to show us a few of his personalities. We really only spend significant time with about four or five of them, including the nine-year-old Hedwig, the schoolmarm-ish Patricia, and Dennis, who seems to be the closest to an actual creep. We also see Kevin visit his therapist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who isn’t convinced things are okay with her most fascinating patient.
Through Dr. Fletcher, we find out that she believes that DID patients can not only change their voices and demeanor, but that they can also alter their body chemistry and physiology in the most extreme cases. Her theory is that many phenomena that some believe are supernatural are actually just these altered brain changing somethings in their host’s body. And the more explanation we get, the more convinced I was that Shyamalan was up to something, which is only partially correct. SPLIT is the filmmaker’s treatise on mental illness, not only in Kevin, but in one of his captives, Casey (THE WITCH’s Anya Taylor-Joy), who flashes back to a time in her childhood when she had to deal with a different type of monster. She’s an outcast at her school, but in this situation, she’s the most resourceful thanks to years of her father training her survival and hunting skills.
The other two girls (Haley Lu Richardson of EDGE OF SEVENTEEN, and Jessica Sula) aren’t exactly useless, but eventually the three are separated and each must figure out how to manipulate Kevin’s many inhabitants. That’s about as deep as I’m willing to go into the story, one that doesn’t have the usual Shyamalan twist, but it still has a doozy of an ending. I was largely impressed with how SPLIT unfolds and how completely McAvoy hurls himself into the abyss of these characters. Equal praise goes to Taylor-Joy who is positively mesmerizing as the young woman who pays close attention to each personality’s words and behavior to determine how best to manipulative them (not always successfully).
I do wonder how Shyamalan would fare directing scripts by other writers. He’s clearly a talent when it comes to the act of filmmaking, but so often there is something fundamentally askew with his screenplays that another set of eyes or a different writer altogether might solve the problem. That being said, with THE VISIT and SPLIT, he seems to be returning to basics (movie basics, not his basics, which are quite detailed and complex), and it suits him to a point. SPLIT has a lot of issues, but they are manageable and are easily outweighed by a pair of sublime performances. I have mixed feelings about the work, but I’m leaning toward recommending it.
