Movie Review: 'Split'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- My guess is that the title of Split is an accurate prophecy of the mass audience's mixed response to it.
We'll soon see.
What we already know is that locally based movie director M. Night Shyamalan's career has been nothing less than a roller coaster ride.
And it remains just that.
That can happen when, early on, you turn out a masterful, beloved, impactful thriller like 1999's The Sixth Sense, then have a number of your respectable or even superior movies be perceived as lesser efforts when compared to your previous masterpiece (Unbreakable, Signs, The Village), next go through a stretch during which your artistic career is seen – rightly or wrongly – as being in decline (Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth), following which you find that your recent dip in the low-rent horror pool (The Visit) is seen as a comeback of sorts.
Which brings us back to Split, a twisted, breathlessly absorbing psychological horror thriller with elements of the supernatural, written and directed by Shyamalan, that just might register with many moviegoers as his most vital work since The Sixth Sense.
Or it might not.
James McAvoy plays a severely troubled guy with dissociative identity disorder who has 23 distinct personalities – yes, you read that right.
For convenience, let's call him Barry.
Barry, certainly sinister but inarguably sympathetic as well, chloroforms and abducts three teenage girls -- Casey (Anna Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula) – and keeps them in a windowless room in an undisclosed location.
The three captives are "treated" to several if not many of his nearly two-dozen personas, which he routinely discusses with Karen, the psychiatrist he sees regularly, played by Betty Buckley.
What they must do to escape, then, is to appeal to his more compassionate or sensitive personalities to help the abductees get away from the more dangerous and threatening personalities that would do them harm.
What the girls don't realize, as they plan their desperate escape strategy, is that their captor aims to reveal a 24th personality to them, one rather ominously known as The Beast.
If ever a premise seemed headed for "torture porn" territory, it's this one. But Shyamalan somehow manages to steer clear of what would be a sorry compromise indeed.
Thus the PG-13 rating.
McAvoy is amazing, more than up to the obvious acting challenge, shifting on a dime among a nine-year-old boy, a British woman, a fashion designer, and the rest of the grotesque parade – although we only get to meet a few of them.
But this ends up being as much a character study as it is a generic horror flick.
Shyamalan's script, "based on a true story," features a complex storyline – like Barry, it's fractured -- that remains taut and tense even as it travels on three distinct paths and has the audience guessing about each of them throughout. And despite the seemingly creepy premise, the film is only minimally gory and is leavened with humor.
But whereas in most abduction thrillers, we would be concentrating on the fate of the kidnapped, here we soon realize that we are here to witness the progression of the ostensible villain.
So there are leaps of faith involved, but Shyamalan trusts his audience to take the claustrophobic journey with him. To that end, he refrains from disclosing too much too soon.
The result will be that some viewers will be let down rather than satisfied by the third act, while others will feel in touch with, and reminded of, Shyamalan's obvious mastery and control of the medium, including the homage-paying shades of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill.
No, the film does not register and please as if it were his The Seventh Sense. But, then, few films do.
So we'll scare up 3 stars out of 4 for Split, which might be too weirdly perverse for many mainstream moviegoers. Ah, but why split hairs? Folks, M. Night Shyamalan is back.
