‘Split’ from film’s unlikable personalities
In “Split,” the latest effort from “The Sixth Sense” gimmick auteur M. Night Shyamalan, Scotsman James McAvoy plays Philadelphia resident Kevin Wendell Crumb, a damaged man with 23 personalities, none of them likable. Among them is a “functioning” gay fashion designer named Barry, who has sessions with Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), a specialist in D.I.D., also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, an illness Dr. Fletcher believes makes its sufferers superior beings.
In tense and frankly horrific opening scenes, Dennis, one of Kevin’s personalities, abducts three underage girls by spraying them and one of their fathers in the face with some sort of chloroform and taking the girls to his hidden lair, where at first they share a single locked room with a spotless bathroom attached. One of the three is Casey Cooke (talented Anya Taylor-Joy, “The Witch”). Casey is an outcast invited to a party by the popular birthday girl Claire (Haley Lu Richardson, “The Edge of Seventeen”) out of pity. The third abducted young woman is Marcia (Welshwoman Jessica Sula).
How do you think things will turn out for Claire and Marcia? When the locked door opens, Dennis usually enters, but sometimes it is 9-year-old Hedwig or prissy female Miss Patricia in skirt and heels.
What actor could resist such a scenery-chewing challenge? I wish McAvoy, best known as Dr. Charles Xavier of the “X-Men” films, had. At times, “Split,” a horrorthriller in which writerdirector Shyamalan makes his usual cameo and posits that the “broken are more evolved,” catnip to geeks, felt like an “X-Men” movie with McAvoy playing all the parts, including Mystique.
In order to make a film featuring unpleasant subject matter even worse, Shyamalan cuts to flashbacks in which a 5-year-old Casey (Izzie Coffey) goes deer hunting with her father (Sebastian Arcelus) and her beardo uncle (Brad William Henke). Some of Kevin’s other personalities have been “banned from the light” for being bad. One of these is Dennis, who likes to watch underage girls dance nude.
When Dr. Fletcher hears news of the brazen abduction of three young women and realizes that banned bad boy Dennis is impersonating Barry, why doesn’t she put two and two together and call the cops? For that matter, how does a man with 23 personalities hold down a 9-to-5 job and keep three girls prisoner? Well, if you’re going to ask intelligent questions, “Split” is not for you.
That the film drags things out and goes on for half an hour longer than it should is par for the Shyamalan course. Ditto for the punishing soundtrack. If you are reminded of “Psycho,” “The Three Faces of Eve,” Shyamalan’s own “Unbreakable” and the overrated “10 Cloverfield Lane,” it’s for good reason.
At times, “Split” suggests what you would have if “The Silence of the Lambs” had focused solely on Brooke Smith’s Catherine Martin. One of Kevin’s personalities is not a person, but a creature known as “the Beast” and it feeds on the “flesh of the pure.” That a film like this can get a PG-13 rating from a dysfunctional MPAA is a very bad joke. Keep your kids far away from “Split.”
(“Split” contains unpleasant subject matter, violence, sexually suggestive material and cannibalism.)