House of Horror

M NIGHT Shyamalan’s trademark twist here is more of a tool, and his treatment of three kidnapped teenage girls who are made to remove their clothes, not too much but not too little either, is only just short of exploitative. However, if Split marks a return to firmer ground for writer-director Shyamalan and his supernatural/psychological thrillers, the credit goes to Mcavoy. He is Dennis/patricia/hedwig/barry/jade etc etc, going up to 23 personalities, as the film repeatedly tells us. Split never gets anywhere close to a glimpse of all 23, but Mcavoy at least seems capable of holding them — and, yes, one more; the film's big reveal — all in.

We meet Dennis first, as Split opens to a creepy beginning where a birthday party finds a strange girl called Casey (Taylor-joy) sitting alone and silent. The father of the birthday girl, Claire (Richardson), offers to drop Casey home. As he is putting the gifts into the trunk of his car, inside which wait Claire, Casey and a third girl, Marcia (Sula), a man approaches him, there is a sound, and unseen by the girls, Dennis enters and takes the wheel.

Dennis is just one of the many personalities of Kevin Wendell Crumb, as we and the girls soon discover, adding to their and our horror and uncertainty. However, rather than focus on what is a nightmare in itself, of three girls locked in the basement by a deranged man with an obsession for cleanliness — the recent 10 Cloverfield Lane comes to mind — Split keeps turning to long sessions of Kevin, now as the gay fashionista Barry, with his counsellor, Dr Fletcher (Buckley).

Dr Fletcher is the outside observer in this story, and good and wise as Buckley is and looks, she appears to be around just so to spell out Kevin’s condition for us. And to nudge us towards thinking of his dissociative identity disorder (or DID) in terms of “unleashing the mind's true potential”, and “an ultimate doorway to things unknown... the supernatural”.

There is a story to how Kevin got here, and it leads back to childhood abuse. There is a story to how Casey got here, and it leads back to childhood abuse too. Both are hinted, never explored, and in Casey’s case recounted in an almost dreamy extended sequence of a hunting expedition, and seem too much of a plot contrivance. The talk of “sacred food”, “evolution”, “sentient beings”, “suffering making one more complete”, and “being banned from light”, may be too much highfalutin after all.

That is also because Casey’s unnatural stillness, a fact the film is seeking to draw our eyes to, seems as much a result of Taylor-joy’s incompetence in portraying the many horrors she is facing. The other two girls are almost as inert, but have lesser to do.

As long as Mcavoy is on screen though, in different voices, clothes, stature, posture, smiles, and even gaze, Split needs little else. He evokes menace, desire, love, respect, pity, and fear. And not necessarily in that order.

The twist in the end, if one can call it that, is ultimately worthwhile for acknowledging this class act. SL AS ROBERT Kennedy, Peter Sarsgaard doesn't have much to do in Jackie except hang at the side of the frame. But he does get in perhaps the most prescient line in the film, “History is harsh. In no time, we are ridiculous.”

Sitting through a film that builds an elaborate portrait of the First Lady who is as much a creation of herself as of the great American obsession with the Kennedys, one can’t help butseethatridiculousness.wearejustemerging from an American presidency where the post of the first spouse was reinvented in ways that it can never return to the Jackie Kennedy years; and we are entering another where the First Lady’s claim to Jackie’s legacy does her no credit. Heck, we even nearly had a woman US president while, in 1963, they only talked about women as wives of US presidents.

As an exploration of a woman finding her feet in the limelight, cast by a famous husband or family, Jackie could have worked. However, one fears Chilean director Larrain, in his first English project, doesn’t want to ruffle too many feathers. He settles for a portrait of Jackie between John F Kennedy’s assassination and his funeral, where she puts in place the first pieces to ensure America’s love affair with them endures. There are many Jackies here, the Jackie of good taste, the Jackie of nerves, the Jackie of uncertainties, the Jackie of the glamorous photos, the Jackie of unglamorous breakdowns, the Jackie who can manipulate, and the Jackie who can manoeuver. The narration is propelled by two interviews, one where a nervous Jackie is seeking to impress in a White House Tour being telecast on TV, an initiative she acknowledges is meant to show she matters; and the other where a confident Jackie, a week after her husband’s assassination, is pushing all the buttons. Portman is Oscar-good, and adequately noted by the Academy.

However, the film appears to carry its own Jackie baggage, maintaining a reverential distance and giving us part glimpses that the woman, who first utters the Camelot word here, herself may have approved. Quite like the veil she wears to Kennedy’s funeral, but ultimately showing only what she wanted the world to see. SL