Split

I honestly am not sure what to make of M Night Shyamalan's Split.  The movie managed to simultaneously fascinate and frustrate me to no end.  On one end of the spectrum, we have the powerhouse performance by James McAvoy, who plays a man with 23 different personalities living inside of him.  This would be a challenge to any actor, and the way that McAvoy throws himself so completely into the role (or roles) is something to definitely see.  But at the same time, it feels like this is a movie built entirely around that performance, and not much else.  While McAvoy is captivating, the movie he's in is less so.

This is intended to be a return to form for the filmmaker, a return to the low budget, tense thrillers that helped him make a name in the industry.  Shyamalan seems to be drawing upon Hitchcock for inspiration here, trying to juggle gripping suspense with a pitch dark sense of humor that ranges from the playful to the downright disturbing.  It should be fascinating, but something felt just a tiny bit off to me.  The movie is never exactly scary in any way, and the tension never builds as it should.  I have heard some people say that this is intentional, but I'm not so sure.  I think Shyamalan is trying to play with his audience here, and generate the emotions of tension and fright.  But far too often, the movie is more weird than genuinely frightening.  Weird is not scary.  It can be creepy, yes, but the way it's used here, it often seems to be weird just for the sake of being weird.  There are even a couple scenes that generated some bad laughs from the audience attending my screening.  Split can be interesting to watch, but it's far too messy for me to label it a total success.

As the film opens, three teenage girls are abducted from the parking lot of a shopping complex after a birthday party.  Two of the girls, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula), are pretty and popular.  The third girl, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy from The Witch), is an outcast who seems to have been invited to the party out of pity.  The kidnapper (McAvoy) takes them to a massive underground bunker that immediately brought flashbacks of 10 Cloverfield Lane to my head.  As the girls try to figure out their situation, they learn that their kidnapper takes on a different persona each time they see him.  Sometimes he's a cruel man obsessed with keeping things clean, sometimes he's dressed as a woman and behaving quite prim and proper, sometimes he's a fashion designer, and he even takes on the personality of a nine-year-old who talks with a lisp.  These personalities seem to react to the girls in different ways.  Some are gentle and compassionate, while others are domineering and have bizarre fetishes, such as enjoying watching the girls take off their clothes and dance.

We learn a little about what is happening from the scenes concerning a therapist (Betty Buckley) who is treating this man.  She believes that a multiple personality can be almost supernatural, with people taking on completely different traits or even features.  She explains once case where a blind woman taught herself how to see because of creating other personalities who were not blind.  The therapist does not know that her patient is keeping the three girls hostage, but the more time she spends with him in their sessions, the more concerned she becomes that this man has either done something awful, or is about to.  The many personalities who live inside this one man keep on talking about a new one that is about to be born - One only known as "The Beast", and who is planning to feast on the flesh of the three captive girls.

I never exactly bought into the science that was being used to explain the disorder that McAvoy's character possessed, but I was at least fascinated.  He is obviously relishing this role, and the opportunity to create these numerous off kilter personalities that inhabit one body.  Whenever the movie is focused solely on the lead performance, it works.  It's the rest of Split that is on somewhat unsure footing.  The three girls at the center of the film never quite develop into unique personalities that we can get behind.  The closest we get are some flashbacks concerning lead girl Casey's childhood, which are supposed to show us how she is a survivor and has overcome great pain.  But these flashbacks are far too fragmented to be dramatically successful.  They often interrupt the flow of the film, as well, so we are taken out of the action.  As it quickly turns out, this would be my central issue with the film.

Split is a movie that seems to stop and flow at random.  The movie would be moving along quite well, holding my interest, and then we would get a flashback, or an extended sequence with the therapist, and it would stop my interest cold.  The pacing of the movie feels off.  In order for a film like this to work, the tone needs to be claustrophobic and suffocating.  We have to feel like we are trapped right along side the girls who are being held in this underground bunker.  But the movie keeps on cutting away from all this, and giving us lengthy scenes where the therapist explains her ideas about what is happening inside McAvoy's character.  The movie never quite creates that sense of mounting dread or terror that I was looking for.  And when the climax comes, it seems more like Shyamalan is desperately trying to keep everything from falling apart, rather than a filmmaker in control of his own story.  I mentioned earlier the Hitchcock influence the movie has.  He would have known how to keep a better focus on this story, and he would have done so without stopping the momentum every few minutes.

The main reason I can recommend you watch this is for the performance of James McAvoy, and a few well done scenes that pop up.  Also, if you are a fan of one of the director's earlier films, you will most likely enjoy the final moments of the movie. (I apologize for being so vague, but I have to avoid spoilers here.) Split only works in fits and starts.  It's kind of odd and overlong, and it never quite comes together, but I also don't regret seeing it.  Not the most ringing of endorsements, I know, but that's the kind of movie this is.  I appreciated it in a lot of ways, but in the end, I think I found myself appreciating it more for what it was trying to do rather than what it actually did.

0 comments