M. Night Comes Full Circle

Rating: 3/10 (30 May 2017)

From prodigy to punchline, M. Night Shyamalan has had fascinating highs and lows as a filmmaker. The man once hailed as the heir to Hitchcock or Spielberg was soon compared to Ed Wood and Uwe Boll... I always found this a bit unfair, due to the tasteful notes sprinkled throughout even his most inept films. But he's finally crossed a line.
Celebrated as a return to form for the creator of the Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Split follows damaged teen Casey (Anja Taylor-Joy) and 2 cliché bitchy teenager friends, who get abducted by Kevin (James McAvoy). The catch being that his disturbed cranium houses 21 conflicting personalities, with the promise of a very sinister 22nd on the way. Intriguing concept. What might the twist be?
There are - contrary to what you might have heard - two twists in Split. The first is that it mostly does exactly what it tells you it's going to do. And boy is there a lot of telling rather than showing in this overdrawn yarn! The beats are telegraphed in advance and the jumps predictable. The second twist plays squarely in the current trend of exploiting viewer nostalgia: in what might be his most forgettable film, Shyamalan dares to shove in a horribly contrived parallel to his greatest work. If Split is meant as a parallel sequel to that other film, then it shares none of the stylistic identity, which makes the forced kinship feel unnatural.
Speaking of style, the filmmaker has also sadly broken with his earlier aesthetic in most of the ways you could imagine. The visual elegance and fluency of his first 3-4 films is gone - as, sadly, is longstanding collaborator James Newton Howard. After plumbing the depths of found footage in his previous film, Shyamalan delivers a film that is often bland and sometimes downright ugly to watch.
Any positive commentary on this film has to do with its cast, so let's give them their due: McAvoy has a ball with his various personalities. It's never subtle stuff, but he throws himself at it and hops effortlessly between all 21 personalities in Kevin's head. Taylor-Joy, a revelation in The Witch, is, once again, luminous, transcending a half-baked part and giving these dreary proceedings what little believability they have. Her partners in confinement barely register, and, hamstrung as she is with terrible expository dialogue, poor Betty Buckly as the caring psychiatrist manages to deliver the worst performance in a M. Night Shyamalan film - yes, even one that features the customary terrible director cameo!
By now the irony of this review's title - and of the situation itself - should be obvious. Shyamalan would have you believe he's come full circle, back to the glory days of his debut. The truth is much sadder: pushed to the limit and with nothing left in him, yesterday's wunderkind is left scraping the bottom of the barrel for echoes of past glories. In that sense, he is sadly representative of an entire industry with a crisis of creativity.