Split Review - Rejoice!

SPOILER REVIEW

A decently crafted psychological thriller, Split is an excellent character piece that marks a welcome return to form for director M. Night Shyamalan.

Anyone vaguely interested in films has observed that the market for superhero films has reached saturation point over the past decade. Unoriginal plots, underused acting talent, and questionable CGI commensurate with the films’ budgets (which are mostly in the millions) has threatened to bring on superhero fatigue. This is also somewhat true for the horror genre. The challenge for these films now is to carve out a niche - or simply tell a good story - if they want to strike a chord with today’s more discerning audience, and if the genre is to survive.

This is exactly what M. Night Shyamalan did with Split, a psychological thriller with a horror feel and a ‘metahuman’ angle on people with disabilities. Simply painting people with physical or neurological disorders as “blessed” in a narrow, romanticized plot would have felt like an unoriginal gimmick (or downright disrespectful). Instead, Split explores the grittier side and has a message in its story. “We look at people who’ve been shattered and different as less than. What if they’re more than us?”

The film starts when Casey Cooke, a teenage girl is kidnapped by a man called “Dennis” after a party, along with two of her classmates. They discover he has multiple personality disorder, sometimes frolicking about them as the 9 year old “Hedwig”, or as “Patricia”, a (mentally) old woman who grooms the girls for a sinister purpose. That, we discover is to feed them to “The Beast”, Kevin’s 24th personality whom Dennis and Patricia both worship and enable. Kevin (the original identity) goes to therapy as “Barry”, his dominant personality. We soon discover that the Beast possesses superhuman abilities that make him extremely dangerous.

The film is tightly focused on the characters and puts the cast’s brilliant acting performances on full display. James McAvoy is the clear standout here. His convincing portrayal of all of Kevin’s different personalities is enough to make your insides squirm, and you never know who is going to pop through the door. But since everyone already knows how well McAvoy does his job, I want to mention Anya Taylor-Joy who, judging by her performance here, looks like she’ll be getting a lot more roles in future. Her character’s repressed but calculating persona is a great match against the rest of the casts’. She gives her fellow hostages a sobering reminder when they overestimate themselves, manipulates the innocent Hedwig into spilling a few secrets and plays along with Patricia’s grooming routine, all the while trying to suppress the fear she visibly feels.

Split’s greatest strength is the unease and terror it builds up in every scene. Aside from the acting, appreciate an inspired soundtrack and visual style. Most of the film is dialogue-heavy, so there’s not much room for creative camera movements or colourful establishing shots. But there are a decent number of memorable shots in the remainder of the film. I remember an unsettling dolly zoom effect Shyamalan uses, where the camera zooms inward while moving away from the subject, when the Beast arrives. There’s also a shot from directly above a street lamp as the Beast runs, that I still remember was shudder-inducing.

Moreover, this film is a rumination on what it means to be different, how we cope with trauma, and the eventual acceptance the strengths a damaging experience leaves us. It’s almost therapeutic, even for the majority of people who have lived close to a “normal” life but most certainly fight battles within them. So rejoice, because if you are a fan of Shyamalan’s, he’s back! If you’re tired of cheap, jump-scare laden horror movies of late, rejoice! This one’s isn’t like that. If you’re bored of equally cheap superhero films, with vacuous villains who threaten to “end the world” with no reason other than they’re evil (I’m lookin’ at you, Steppenwolf), then rejoice!

Bottom line, I had fun with this movie. It’s a harmless but solid thriller. I knew James McAvoy was a good actor but his role here showed me why. Split is definitely worth your money and a movie night out (or in).