[star rating=”3″]
SPLIT. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan with James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy and Betty Buckley.
Karen Rutter
M. Night Shyamalan has pretty much owned the modern supernatural movie sector for the past two decades. Beginning with The Sixth Sense (back in 1999) and moving through Signs, The Village, The Happening and so on, he’s clearly happiest when seeing dead people. Even his live ones are pretty spooky.
Which makes for engaging viewing, if that’s your bag. But things get shaky when Shyamalan moves into the supernatural/psychological realm. Take The Visit, for example, in which a couple who work for the local mental hospital are murdered by two bloodthirsty inmates. The message? Mentally ill = psycho maniac.
It gets uncomfortable again with Spilt, in which a man who has multiple personalities goes rogue and unleashes his inner beast. Literally. James McAvoy plays Kevin, a guy with 23 separate identities who decides to abduct three teenage girls and lock them in an abandoned building. The kids are (understandably) freaked out when Kevin presents with a different character each time he opens their locked door (a nine-year-old boy, an obsessive-compulsive young man, a prissy older woman, and more). Nobody (including us viewers) seems to know why he is doing this. Until it turns out that our Kev has been battling to keep his 24th personality from popping out. This character, known as The Beast, wanted the girls to be captured for his nefarious purposes. And he’s masterminding Kevin and all his 23 other personas to do his will.
There’s some back-story concerning a young girl and her uncle, and Kevin’s sympathetic psychiatrist, which is thrown willy-nilly into the mix. But it does the script no favours, merely adding to an offensive take on mental illness in general and dissociative identity disorder in particular.
That said – Shyamalan is also a master at building suspense, of creating creepy crescendos, and throwing macabre curveballs. All of which suffuse Split. And McEvoy’s Kevin turns in a mesmerising performance, whether you like the mental politics behind the film or not. Switching from hyper-active child to obsessive yuppie with chameleon-like skill, you can’t help being awed by his execution.
So – big up to the suspense, not so much for the sentiment. A Split review.
WS
