Split Review
We can sit here all day and start this review by going through director M. Night Shyamalan’s career, but I think just about everybody agrees: his first three, The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002) were good or great, and everything else has been crap. While I personally haven’t seen The Visit (2015), a lot of people said it was a turnaround for the director. Well, if we want to use a car going into the ditch as a metaphor for his career, The Visit was him turning the wheel back toward the road, and Split is him driving back up onto the road.
So if you’ve seen any ads or trailers, you get the basic gist: three teenage girls are kidnapped by a man with multiple personalities. As he holds them, they realize that this isn’t a simple case where you trick your captor into escape. They might fool one personality, but there are 23 more waiting. In the meantime, we get a little side story with a therapist who routinely meets with the man, whose real name is Kevin, but who meets with her as Barry, one of the personalities. If we go any further into the events that happen in the film, we’ll be getting into spoiler territory so we’ll stop here and get to why I enjoyed this movie so much.
First off, the cast is a good one, including Anya-Taylor Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula as the captured girls, Betty Buckley as the therapist, and of course James McAvoy as Kevin and the other personalities. Especially for McAvoy, whom I’ve always liked as an actor but never taken as seriously as I do now. And this is a challenge. His character can jump from a nine-year-old boy to a philosopher type character to a beast at any time. The same can go for Anya-Taylor Joy, whose work last year in The Witch (2016) showed she was off to a great start as an actress, but now she shows she does have a solid career ahead of her. Also Shyamalan knows how to use the environments to effect. While initially it looks like any Saw franchise location, as we get further into the movie we see that there’s more to it than that. Again I don’t go outright and spoil stuff for the audience, so I won’t go further on that. However, I will say to stick around for the whole thing. There’s a couple of spots where it looks like the end of the movie. Trust me, don’t check out until the very end. There’s a cool reveal. I’ll leave it at that.
This all being said, these two elements are the strongest aspects of the film. For a few complaints, I’ll start with this: the therapist character should really get her glasses checked. I mean, come on, how obvious is it to everybody but her that Kevin should be institutionalized? There is a line where she says that she can control him and bring Kevin out at any time, but this is a pretty pithy excuse to keep him on the streets, especially when they mention a couple of events that have happened before where a normal person would be prosecuted and restraining orders would be in good order. Then we get a little backstory with one of the girls who are held captive, and while initially it does show a couple of strengths to her character, it didn’t really feel all too relevant to the main story. And as you can probably imagine, the ending dissolves into a chase scene that just about every thriller feels the need to end on, and the resolution to this scene left me a little disappointed. Really, that’s the reason why x happens? Yeah, I’m not going to spell it out, but there’s stuff that the average viewer can enjoy more so without someone like me telling them.
I guess this is a tough one to review since so much of the marketing and word of mouth has been set up in this way: set up the basic premise for the audience then get the hell out of there. That’s the experience I had when I sat down and watched the movie, and I’m kind of grateful I got that. The ads did a great job of letting us know the feel of the movie and not the plot of the movie. I wish more studios had this kind of confidence in their material. Again, with such strong work here, we have to take James McAvoy, Anya-Taylor Joy, and yes, even M. Night Shyamalan, much more seriously as filmmakers. While I’ve never been a gigantic hater of the guy, I’m glad M. Night is back on track, and hopefully he can keep that car on the road and not have to wreck again.
My rating: 8/10.
