While the women make desperate attempts either to escape or to befriend aspects of Kevin, Shyamalan takes the film in two directions. The most sinister persona of all is Patricia, a silkily menacingly Englishwoman with a penchant for Chinese music and words like “crepuscular” it’s wonderful to see McAvoy getting in touch with his inner Lindsay Duncan.
Then there’s Hedwig, aged 9, a manic, lisping child who impishly sits on the prisoners’ threshold, and at one point launches into a demented break-dance routine. The most charming alter is Barry, a fashion designer played by McAvoy as charming and only moderately camp. He has OCD hygiene issues (“germaphobes” really haven’t been enjoying great PR this week), and is tormented by a desire to see young women dancing naked, which for the purposes of this film is consistently frustrated. Dennis is the nervous, twitchy, repressed martinet, literally buttoned tightly in a grey shirt. Shyamalan and DP Michael Gioulakis neatly mark her detachment from the others a pipe runs down the wall between them, signifying that the titular split of the title isn’t just within Kevin, but within his group of captives.Īs we meet Kevin’s alters, the film becomes a stage for McAvoy to unleash a whole repertoire of personas-rather like Michael Keaton in Multiplicity, only without the costly CGI. Locked up in Dennis’s cellar, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) instantly start planning ways to fight back and escape, refusing to countenance “this victim shit.” Casey seems defeatist, however, and doesn’t want to fight back, at least not yet. Shyamalan puts on a decent show of avoiding the old exploitative girls-in-peril routine. In other words, she’s a refined soul who, because she’s possibly as damaged as Kevin, will be the one to tackle him on his own terms. An overtly Hitchcockian track in and zoom out defines her as separate from the others, moody, detached, lost in herself. The third, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), is the only one to register this at first-but she’s set up from the opening first moments as the film’s Final Girl. Two of them are too busy fiddling with their mobiles to even notice that Dennis has got into their car. Three young women get abducted from a car park by Kevin’s most Norman Bates-ish self, Dennis. The premise is the old girls-kidnapped-by-dangerous-predator routine. Pritchard” I hoped we’d get to hear McAvoy do a terribly proper Kelsey Grammer voice. I was particularly disappointed not to make the acquaintance of the formal-sounding “Mr.
The film’s villain is Kevin, a youngish man played by James McAvoy-who also plays Kevin’s “alters,” including Patricia, Hedwig, Barry, and assorted others. It’s still a much-debated phenomenon, but Shyamalan’s premise here is that DID is not only real and to be taken seriously, but that it might also potentially be-for the purposes of storytelling, at least-some kind of superhuman capacity. The theme is dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder, a condition that causes people’s selves to fragment into multiple personas. If that’s what he does think, he’s wrong- Split is essentially silly and paper-thin-yet Shyamalan goes about his business here with a mixture of seriousness and exuberance that’s never less than entertaining and arresting. That is to say, it’s derivative in a whole-hearted way that takes a lot of stuff you’ve seen before and pushes it to an absurd extreme-not in the manner of Tarantino-esque intertextual knowingness, but in the sense that Shyamalan seems to think he can make this material deeper, more resonant, altogether more significant than elsewhere. It’s also preposterous, contentious for various reasons, and altogether derivative. Well, let it be said, Split is kind of refreshing. It is, I suppose, the director’s way of saying, “Didja miss me?” I wasn’t expecting a last-minute twist of the sort that he painted himself into a corner with years ago, but in fact the film concludes with something decidedly odder-a throwaway coda in which a former Shyamalan star ruefully turns up to acknowledge an allusion to one of MNS’s earlier movies. But, like many people, I found my patience tested beyond endurance by Lady in the Water (or, as I prefer to call it, Vamp From the Damp), a film at once pompous, insipid and-let it be said once and for all-wrong, so wrong, about film critics.Īnyway, having missed found-footage chiller The Visit-which many hailed as a refreshing back-to-basics number-I came to Shyamalan’s Split prepared for anything. I loved his early ones, even the much-maligned The Village, with its insane double twist and loopy Hawthorne-meets-Lovecraft imagery. I’ve spent the last decade staying away from the films of M.
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