Exclusive film review: Split

DIRECTOR: M. Night Shyamalan

STARRING: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula, Betty Buckley

ON AT: Movieplex Cinema Plaza, Grand Cinema & More, Happy Cinema, Hollywood Multiplex, Cinema City Cotroceni, Cinema City Sun Plaza, Cinema City Mega Mall, Cinema City ParkLake

by Debbie Stowe

One test of a good actor is versatility: are they convincing in starkly different roles, or is there just one thing that they do quite well in all their films? So Kevin Spacey (equally convincing playing a psycho killer as he is a lovelorn dweeb) passes the test with flying colors, while Hugh Grant (seldom venturing beyond self-effacing upper-class Englishman) doesn’t.

By this measure, James McAvoy must be a superlative actor, because he not only nails turns as a prim matron, a geeky nine-year-old boy and a steely-eyed obsessive-compulsive – he does it all in the same movie.

If his performance had come in a “serious” film, the Scot could well have had a shot at an Oscar. But instead, it comes in this psychological horror-thriller, from kooky supernatural-dabbling director M. Night Shyamalan, and so the actor will have to settle for wowing the popcorn-eating masses.

The “split” of the title refers to personality. As a young boy, Kevin (McAvoy) suffered severe abuse at the hands of his mother, the trauma of which has resulted in dissociative identity disorder, meaning he now has 23 different selves vying for dominance, all coming to the surface at various times.

One of them takes a perverted interest in teenage girls, which is how three such come to be locked up in a creepy cellar (atmospherically highly reminiscent of 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane) a few minutes into the film.

Two of the girls, Claire and Marcia (Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula), are the slightly superficial, all-American teens who make up the typical killer-fodder in slayer flicks. The other, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), however, is cut from a different cloth: the high school weirdo, she seems more familiar with the behavior of predatory men, for reasons that gradually become clear in flashbacks. Will her childhood suffering and subsequent understanding of the nature of sickos be the key that helps the girls escape?

Split’s basic premise of attractive teenage girls kept in captivity by a madman is well worn, and much of the action is standard stuff: is he coming to kill them? No, not yet; foiled escape attempts; chase scenes; excuses to remove the clothing of nubile actresses, you know the drill.

The plot’s quirk, though, is that it’s not so much whether the cops will arrive in time to save the damsels in distress, but whether one of Kevin’s more benign personalities will come to the fore and stop his darker selves from carrying out their evil designs. (Though even this isn’t new: the 2003 John Cusack film Identity had a very similar premise.)

Working towards a positive outcome is kindly psychologist Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), Kevin’s long-term shrink, who believes in her patient and tries to help him keep his demons at bay.

His therapy sessions (during which we know his prisoners are safe for now) form a nice tonal counterpoint to the tenser scenes back in the cellar, and give the viewer a break from the claustrophobia. The atmosphere is well maintained, and though some of the scenes are hackneyed, Split is an effective chiller.

It’s greatly elevated by McAvoy’s virtuoso performance: in a weaker actor’s hands, the action could have descended into camp, but the Scot maintains as much believability as the storyline allows. Shyamalan also throws the viewer some curveballs late on (including a bizarre cameo that will be baffling until you research the context of the movie), which keep Split from following the captive-teens-in-peril-from-lunatic clichés too faithfully.

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