McAvoy shines in the psych thriller ‘Split’
His trusted psychiatrist says she’s never seen a case like this before: “23 distinct personalities live inside Kevin’s body.” That’s equivalent to two football teams, or nearly six bridge tables. If she billed them all separately, she’d be rich.
The big problem in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split” is the one still waiting to come out and direct the others. He wastes no time from the get-go, with a slick curbside abduction of three high school girls on their way home from a birthday party.
Kidnapper Kevin (James McAvoy) deposits them — taciturn Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), terrified Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and tearful Marcia (Jessica Sula) — in his underground lair, a huge concrete bunker full of nooks, crannies and corridors but no exits. There, he toys with them as Dennis, Orwell, Barry, Jade.
It’s hard to keep them straight — some, of course, are gay. They change in a split second. The girls must find the one or two who might help them, while keeping a step ahead of the others. The best
candidate seems to be “Hedwig.” Claire asks how old he is.
“Nine,” he answers. “Are you trying to trick me? You shouldn’t trick children. I’ll tell on you. ... We’re more powerful than you think.”
Maybe “Miss Patricia” — the personality in the skirt — can better assist?
“Don’t worry,” she says, “I’ll talk to him. He’s not allowed to touch you. ... He listens to me.” Who is “he”? Casey is a good negotiator — depending on whom she’s negotiating with. Just when she figures out one personality, another takes over. Who’s in charge here?
In the performance department, it’s Mr. McAvoy, having a field day with his shaved head and demented grin as he slips from persona to persona. (Joaquin Phoenix bowed out of the role for scheduling reasons.) Broadway star Betty Buckley is slumming but effective as Dr. Fletcher, probably making more than for all her Tony roles combined. Ms. Taylor-Joy (terrific in last year’s “The Witch”) is good, too, with the heroine’s benefit of a marginally intriguing backstory here.
Not so with scantily clad fellow hostages, Ms. Sula and Ms. Richardson, who — like this screenplay — are none too resourceful in a crisis. You can’t have a good nubile-girls-in-peril flick if they’re only interesting for their degree of clad or unclad nubility.
It just took me three times to override the spellchecker’s autocorrect of “nubility” to nobility. I tell you this, even as I know I should be paying more attention to their life-threatening situation than to how meagerly or abundantly clad they are. But it’s a long movie and I’m getting on in years. Before this is over, Mr. Shyamalan will have Kevin (and me) climbing the walls — too big a buildup and small a payoff waiting for the beastly 24th persona to appear.
Not that it isn’t entertaining at times. The writer-director makes the most of his claustrophobic setting and of Kevin’s twisted obsessivecompulsive disorder. (Assigning the girls’ cleaning duties, he instructs them to “use the blue bottle for floors, the pink bottle for ceramic surfaces.”) But “Split” falls way short of his brilliant “The Sixth Sense” (1999) — or even his uneven “Signs” (2002) and “The Happening” (2008). If only someday Mr. Shyamalan’s scripts could stop short of over- and go under-the-top.
Multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a real and serious mental illness, conveniently demonized here — yet again — by Hollywood. The demented Kevin has certain disturbing similarities to the Aurora cinema shooter whose shrink thought she had him under control. But why, in fairness, doesn’t somebody create a monster character afflicted (and motivated) by diabetes?
Well, for one thing, insulin shock is less photogenic.
Ever-sympathetic Dr. Fletcher opines that DID patients may really be gifted — each of their identities perhaps containing valuable “doors to the unknown”! Kevin may just be suffering a glorified “mood disorder.”
I’m now suffering my own. What did it, watching the movie, was Kevin’s wacko fashionista persona named BARRY. Just a little coincidence that I shouldn’t take personally? No way. It’s based on me. How do I know? I can feel it.
Trust me. And be careful: I’m coming back soon — very soon — to a theater near YOU.
Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: parispg48@aol.com.