Movie Review: “Split” isn’t the M. Night Shyamalan comeback fans were hoping for but it’s… something?
Spoilers ahead. What do you expect? It’s a review for a fucking M. Night Shyamalan movie.
Oh, M. Night Shyamalan. You had the keys to the kingdom back in the late 90’s, when your genuinely rattling ghost story “The Sixth Sense” launched what would be an impressive and frustrating career, one marked by wild successes and even more pronounced misfires. What happened, man?
To be fair, films like “The Sixth Sense” are like lightning in a bottle — they happen only once a few years, and when we are graced with them, these works shift the paradigm of whichever genre they inhabit. Few directors could have followed, much less improved, on “The Sixth Sense’s” blood-freezing marriage of slow-burning supernatural terror and eerie, almost European stillness, though Shyamalan gave it a spirited try with his fascinatingly weird superhero parable “Unbreakable” as well as “Signs,” his Mel Gibson-starring alien arrival flick that was almost as good as “Sixth Sense” until, uh, the aliens actually showed up.
After “Signs,” Shyamalan disappeared into a hole of humorlessness and megalomania from which he almost didn’t escape. How else do you explain the likes of his sleep-inducing folk tale “The Village,” which contains one of the most moronic climactic reveals in motion picture history? Or how about “The Happening,” which is like Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” but sadistically re-engineered to punish and torment its audience instead of teasing them with thrills? And let’s not even get into “The Last Airbender” and “After Earth,” Shyamalan’s dreadful attempts at large-scale tentpole filmmaking that all but obliterated whatever meager goodwill the director’s most ardent fans still felt towards him.
That Shyamalan is a technically proficient director has never been in question. You don’t make movies like “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable” without a considerable degree of talent. The issue is that, for the last couple of years, Mr. Shyamalan hasn’t been able to locate the thrilling gifts that made him such an exciting storyteller in the first place. He seems amiss, swimming in a sea of self-congratulatory hokum. If his mid-career output is anything to go by, Mr. Shyamalan is more content to goose his audience then provide them with a thriller worth seeking their teeth into. If the director isn’t trolling his audience, he’s certainly pivoting often enough that expecting any kind of consistent quality output from him seems like a fool’s errand.
Shyamalan took a step in the right direction with 2015’s “The Visit,” a modest, low-budget found footage shocker about two precocious teens who take a vacation with their unassuming grandparents and eventually discover that the lovable old couple are, shocker, not who they seem to be. “The Visit” was hardly scary, containing nothing as nightmare-inducing as the opening moments of “The Sixth Sense,” but the film was cheeky in a kind of diabolical way, restoring a much-needed sense of levity and humor to Shyamalan’s increasingly self-serious world. The film also played with cliché (Sweet old people! They’re not who they seem to be, man!) in a way that was, dare I say, novel. It was also the first big indication that Shyamalan had reached the point of no return when it came to constructing would-be mythologies like “The Village” and his truly inexplicable “Lady in the Water” in place of real, genuine horror. “The Visit” is certainly not Shyamalan’s finest hour as a director but it was clever and fun and, as an audience movie, it was arguably more satisfying than anything that he had made in a decade.
“Split” is Shyamalan’s latest cinematic puzzle box, one that wisely maintains “The Visit’s” deeply gallows humor and adds a couple dozen confounding layers of psychological conjecture for good measure. The tale of a mentally disturbed loner with twenty-four (count ’em) different personalities and the innocent teenage girls whom he kidnaps from a parking lot one day, “Split” is pared-down and ruthlessly efficient whereas some of Shyamalan’s worst work practically suffocates on its own bloat. Some fans have championed “Split” as a return to form for the once-promising filmmaker: a former maven of the macabre returning to the elegant Hitchcockian tension of spectacular early work and playing his audience like a fiddle.
While I’d love to report that that’s true, “Split” is ultimately a less successful film than “The Visit,” though it’s nowhere near as awful as some of Shyamalan’s career low points. Not unlike its demonic protagonist, “Split” is a couple different things rolled into one strange, somewhat ungainly whole. It wants to be a dark comedy about a diseased mind, a Blumhouse-produced jump scare thriller about smart, resourceful teenage girls outwitting a homicidal psychopath, a vague fable about abuse, and also a semi-serious look at certain mental dissociative disorders. And while it’s certainly never dull, the film also never coagulates into anything greater than the sum of its parts. It’s as though Shyamalan is allergic to being boring, while at the same time refusing to settle on one tone or mood for the story he’s set out to tell. The result is never anything less than watchable, though it ends up being deeply frustrating; perhaps more so since it is being touted as a kind of comeback for its director.
While “Split” sees Shyamalan flexing his conceptual muscles in a way that he hasn’t since “Unbreakable” (more on that connection later), his newest film also seems confused on an almost fundamental level on what kind of yarn it wants to be. Are we watching a claustrophobic mood piece, a kind of cat-and-mouse thriller of the mind? A look at mental illness that is only occasionally sincere? An excuse for actor James McAvoy to try on about half a dozen accents, cadences and speech patterns, most of which somehow sound like they’re from somewhere around Brooklyn? Are we supposed to know what’s going on? Does Shyamalan know?
In truth, “Split” nobly wishes to operate in all these registers, though it manages to avoid the director’s regrettable proclivity for sentimental fairy-tale horseshit until its truly baffling final shot. I get why some fans have rushed to proclaim “Split” as a return to Shyamalan’s glory days: in spite of its underwritten central trio, patchy pacing and structural errors, the movie is probably Shyamalan’s most purely entertaining movie since “Signs,” and McAvoy is having a blast in an all-or-nothing role that a young Anthony Hopkins would have devoured like Hannibal Lecter devours fava beans with a glass of Chianti. And you may get exactly what you came for if you go to check out “Split” on a Friday night: a passable, competently executed and wholly unremarkable head-trip thriller. What you will not get, it kills me to say, is the M. Night Shyamalan comeback that so many people are talking about.
The film’s opening scene is its strongest. Anya-Taylor Joy, the remarkable young actress from Robert Egger’s “The Witch” (a truly effective horror film that only improves with each subsequent viewing), is our Heroic Teenage Girl du jour. Her name is Casey: she’s a quiet brunette with a dark past and a history of self-harm. We open with her at the mall with her two friends, both of whom are cheery and agreeable in that generic way that movie teenagers tend to be.
While sitting in the passenger’s seat, preparing to depart from the mall parking lot, Casey looks over and is surprised to see a strange man sitting behind the steering wheel. The man is not her father, who drove the girls to the mall, but rather a perturbed-looking man named Kevin (McAvoy). Even before Kevin has effectively assaulted the girls and dragged them back to his dank, creepy basement compound, Shyamalan has displayed a sophisticated understanding of cinematic economy and gradually ratcheting up the stakes of what we’re witnessing. In this isolated, terrifically unnerving opening, Shyamalan tips his hat to his forefather Brian De Palma, whose ingenious use of silence, framing and negative space the younger filmmaker seeks to emulate. In the case of both directors, this stylish window dressing often acts as a distraction from the so-called “plot,” which is often so muddled as to be incomprehensible, though De Palma’s visual fireworks ultimately put him in a different league than his more youthful counterpart.
And the plot of “Split”… I mean, Jesus. To be fair, it’s mostly a rote variation on the will-they-or-won’t-they survival/escape scenario, played out with three modestly intelligent teenage girls attempting to outwit their demented captor. Frustratingly, Shyamalan continually undermines the action by cutting back to Kevin’s sessions with his therapist Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley). These scenes provide us with backstory into Kevin’s awful plight, but they also badly detract from the clammy, intense mood generated from the scenes with Kevin and the girls. The result is a horror movie with a serious case of tonal whiplash. Deliberate or not, it still took me out of the story.
The most interesting aspect of “Split” is watching the strange fluidity with which the sniveling, evil Kevin seems to float, like a trapeze artist, between his various personalities. There’s Barry, an effeminate, possibly gay New Yorker with a background in fashion, plus Hedwig, a creepy, lisping nine-year old whom the girls end up manipulating to their own ends. Of course, the third act twist — because really, what’s an M. Night Shyamalan movie without a totally ludicrous plot reversal in the final stretch — involves Kevin’s most lethal and violent personality, known simply as “The Beast”. The Beast’s reveal is quite something, seeing Shyamalan swing for the fences that he hasn’t since “Signs”. It’s a big move, one that underlines everything we’ve just seen in a way that may have some audience viewers howling with laughter or throwing up their hands in aggravation.
The story goes that Shyamalan starting writing the role of Kevin a long time ago for actor Joaquin Phoenix, who had a small but memorable role in the otherwise dreadful “The Village”. As much as Phoenix is one of my favorite working actors of the moment, I personally am quite glad that this never came to pass. Phoenix is an actor who will devour the scenery if you let him, and he needs a director — your James Grays, your Spike Jonzes, for instance — that understands his unwound screen persona and can either reel it in, temper it or make an attempt to understand it and play to its strengths. Shyamalan is not that filmmaker, and I shudder to think of the overacting that Phoenix might have indulged in if he had accepted the part. McAvoy was a smart choice: he’s a fine, commanding actor who, until now, has been distinguished by the subtlety of his gifts, not a propensity to go over the top — which is exactly what a tricky part like this needs.
McAvoy goes all-out as Kevin and his unpredictable explosions of violence, his strange innocence and childlike fear are what keep us watching when the rest of “Split” threatens to sputter out and die. I can imagine that those with a background in psychology or an academic insight into what actually makes D.I.D. a problem within the mental health community might find something reprehensible in Kevin’s characterization or really just “Split” as a whole. Parsing the ethical responsibilities of this very haphazard movie would require a mind more finely attuned than my own. Still, as a performer, McAvoy is only doing what’s asked of him. And frankly, it’s a hoot to see this normally more mannered actor finally let off the leash. He’s fantastic.
I won’t spoil the movie’s final frame for you, suffice to say it elicited in me the same groaning reaction as I had to the climactic shot of Gareth Edwards’ recent “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”. Without giving too much away, I will say that “Split” apparently shares some narrative DNA with “Unbreakable,” and Shyamalan has stated that “Split” is a thematic sequel to that 2000 film, never mind the fact that “Unbreakable” is the far better film and, y’know, it came out sixteen fucking years ago.
I want to ask the filmmakers: is this what it’s come to? Has our current obsession with world-building become so all-encompassing that all quote-unquote event films must now end with a cheap “gotcha” moment? I have news for the people who are enjoy this sort of thing: world-building is a trend. It’s a fad. It will peak, peter out and die, and next year, it will be replaced by something else. I may revisit “Split” in 2018, but it’s doubtful I’ll ever come around to embracing that ending. It’s a shame Shyamalan wasn’t around in the 80’s: he’d make a hell of an exploitation director. The problem seems to be that he’s still convinced he’s making great art. Grade: C+.
