Split Review: Shyamalan's Inventive Thriller Poises Director for Historic Comeback

Split follows the story of three young girls who are kidnapped by a crazed man with an unprecedented case of Split Personality Disorder.  The girls must fight for their lives while their abductor's psychology spirals out of control as more is revealed about the past - and future - of the characters.  It stars James McAvoy (X-Men Franchise) as the kidnapper and Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) as his very unlucky victim.

M. Night Shyamalan has made some of my favorite movies in Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but he has also made some of the most universally-hated movies of recent years in Last Airbender and The Happening.  Last year, The Visit teased a potential return to form for the nose-diving director, but was it a fluke or will Split bring Shyamalan back on his path to greatness?  

(There will be NO spoilers in this review, so read on fearlessly.)





What I Loved

• Faster, More Intense
• Split is filled with constant growing tension.  It uses it's confined space and slow reveals to build almost constantly from an uneasy beginning to a heart-racing finale.
• Established Stars and New Talent
• James McAvoy gives the performance of his career and injects the power of an acclaimed star to a deeply scary and fun villain.  Anya Taylor-Joy brings in the indie darling, up-and-coming energy to yet another fantastic small budget horror, setting up a huge future career.
• Wait a Second...
• I will not go into any specifics, but the twist in this movie is one of M. Night's best, fitting thematically and contextually, while managing to shed new light on the entire film.  Not everyone will appreciate the moment, but those who do will be left spinning.

What I Liked

• Do Leads Need Support?
• The two main leads of this movie are great characters with intriguing growth and building backstories. The supporting cast is fairly wasted, serving mostly as means to deliver or receive action from the leads.  I left thoroughly invested in the leads but forgetting the support.  

What I Disliked

• Fill Me In
• While many of the scenes do end up with thematic or character importance, there are a few scenes that feel like serious filler to try and push the fairly short premise into a bit longer of a final film.

What I Hated

• Science is for Nerds Anyway
• The psychology behind the lead character and the exaggerated portrayal of the disorder relied a little too much on vague language and tropey stereotypes.  It does serve the story and I think after the end it's recontextualized, but it still falls into too much exposition in the early turns.

Faster, More Intense

The shining element of Split is just how well Shyamalan establishes and builds tension and fear.  Like many of his early thrillers like Sixth Sense, this movie is not afraid to take its time in the early acts to build characters and establish the situation.  This helps tremendously throughout the movie as the stakes raise slowly, making even the smallest amount of movement and change chillingly huge.  

In particular, Shyamalan uses his limited setting well.  Within the house, we are mostly subjected entirely to the perspective of the captives (three young girls) only knowing what they know about the geography of their dim new home.  We discover more about the rooms and building slowly with deliberate pacing, making each new door and corner a promising new possibility for escape or terror.  

Established Stars and New Talent

James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy are both at peak performance as the two leads of Split.  McAvoy stars as the villain, Kevin, who has Dissociative Identity Disorder (AKA Split Personality).  He gives a impactful and fascinating performance, magnetic in every one of his scenes.  McAvoy's performance is easily the most important element of the movie's success.  If he overplayed the silliness or large shifts of personality, he would have turned the movie into a truly ridiculous disaster and crushed any believability the film may have had.  If he played it too subtle, it would have felt less significant when his personalities shifted and ultimately severely weakened the tension and changes towards the end.

Thankfully, his performance is perfectly balanced.  Each personality that we spend time with feels separate and unique, not just in voice, but in behavior, mannerisms and appearance.  Just a few shifts in his face and posture can show an entirely different character that we will instantly recognize as a new or returning personality even before they say a word.  He plays them each like entirely unique characters, but also has small threads that remind us that this is still one person.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays the other side of the skillful coin.  Most known for her lead role in The Witch, she was an indie darling with strong potential.  This movie will be what launches her into the mainstream.  She helps mold a engaging lead character with subtle depth, playing a mix of matured adult and young teen. She will be overshadowed by McAvoy, but she should not be forgotten.

Wait a Second...

This is a NO SPOILER review, so I cannot go into any detail on the various twists and turns of this plot, but this movie does contain several small but powerful curves along the way and a somewhat significant reveal towards the end.  The small twists along the way are certainly enough to keep us invested, but none of them feel like they are too big for the film or entirely out of left field.  I highly recommend seeing this movie as soon as possible, even if you have moderate interest, to avoid some of the bigger reveals coming to you before you get the chance to them play out.  Many elements of the movie that I did not seem to grasp or enjoy at the moment all came together at the end. Every turn in the movie feels setup and intentional, as if it was all planned entirely from the start rather than thrown it at the end just to have one.  The only big flaw I can see in this moment is that it makes a few assumptions of the audience and, while it is a fairly safe assumption to make, there are guaranteed to be several people who do not get it or even miss the reveal entirely.  Those who so get it will be left simply bewildered.
 

Do Leads Need Support?

I deeply attached to the two lead characters, but the supporting cast is a weaker patch of the film overall.  James McAvoy's single-body multiple-mind character is a terrifying but somewhat sympathetic villain.  Anya Taylor-Joy's Casey is an engaging protagonist with a practical objectivity under stress that makes her stand out from the archetypes that women are often thrown into in horror-thrillers.  She is a smart survivalist with an interesting past that is revealed gradually throughout the film,  giving context to her early motives and actions.

However not all characters are created equal.  The side characters, including the other two girls who are captured and a therapist character introduced early on, are thoroughly wasted.  They are belittled to the background, used almost entirely as a means for one of the two leads to give or receive information that the audience needs to know.  While not every character needs to be a major focus, it would have helped to give each of them a moment or two to shine and make them less of pure plot devices.   

Fill Me In

The first true flaw of the movie is the level of filler that takes up some of the early half of the movie.  This movie is meant to be a slow burn, but it often feels like many scenes are put into the early movie entirely to make it last longer.  Some of them have thematic and character value that comes to light later on, but many of them feel out of place and unneeded, mostly just telling us the same information that we already know a few times over.  These moments of filler not only feel unimportant, but can harm the tension overall by pulling us out of perspective and giving us a view of the world that I did not entirely want.  If it was not for a few reveals later on that make some of these scenes valuable in context, this element would be deep down in the Hate section.

Science is for Nerds Anyway

For me the biggest flaw goes hand in hand with the filler in the way that Kevin's mental illness is discussed by outside characters.  There are several scenes involving a therapist who is trying to investigate and understand the new level of disorder that the villain is experiencing.   Some of the dialogue of her explaining her view are almost laughable because of how little sense they make it context of the real world.  The exaggerated mental disorder trope is strong in many horror movies, but could have easily been forgiven if Shyamalan didn't feel the need to constantly point at it in these therapist scenes.  

Some of the behavior of this medical professional are truly idiotic and strange and are realistically partially responsible for just how crazy Kevin went because of her inefficient treatment.  By the end, her behavior is recontextualized in an interesting way that will make this flaw go away somewhat in rewatch, but it still gave us almost an entire movie of Soap Opera level explanations for mental illness that pull us away from the tension and mystery of the rest of the movie and break perspective for no real reason.

Conclusions

Overall, Split is a very strong comeback for Shyamalan that not only sets him on the right track, but propels him miles down that track.  It's highly intense with an almost masterful use of space and geographical growth.  The lead actors are both fantastic, with McAvoy bringing depth and dedication to his villainous role and Anya Taylor-Joy pushing her career forward as an engaging lead character with some unforeseen elements.  Sadly. these two great leads are backed up by disappointing supporting cast who fall into exposition and filler roles that often weigh down the early half of the movie.  Outdated tropes can bring down some scenes, but fascinating reveals and turns throughout help bring the film into new perspective and cast several events in new light.  

Thanks for reading my review of Split!  It was my first review of 2017 and I cannot wait to bring you more in the rest of the year, including reacting to the Oscar nominations next week.  Let me know what you think of the movie and of Shyamalan's other works in the comments, and please try to leave it spoiler free for this movie.

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