More of the Same from M. Night Shymalan

Rating: 6/10 (22 January 2017)

The works of M. Night Shymalan are certainly an acquired taste. A taste that has not been acquired by mainstream American audiences for the better part of seventeen years if we're being totally honest. Make a short list of movies that have angered audiences with misplaced pretension and/or rug-pulling twists that don't make sense, and you're liable to find the directors name all over it. Yet much like fake news, ska music and smallpox, his personal clout and unique mix of genre tropes are having themselves a bit of a comeback. And nowhere is that more evident than in his newest film Split.
Split's main conceit; the mysteries of the human mind, are exemplified by the traumatized Kevin (McAvoy) who becomes our villain of sorts. His psychoanalyst Dr. Fletcher (Buckley) believes he possesses 23 distinct personalities, all of whom vary in age, gender, interests, mannerisms, personal histories and even body chemistry. This of course comes as a shock to three teenage girls who have been taken hostage by one or more of Kevin's personalities, many of whom have a cult-like obsession or fear of "The Beast" the rumored 24th. While huddled in a locked basement awaiting their fates, the three girls must decide which personalities to trust while keeping their eyes peeled for ways to escape.
With Split, it seems that Shymalan has finally accepted the fact that he'll never be anything more than a B-movie director. A brief look at his filmography reveals that even at his worst, Shymalan has used the same sophisticated visual vocabulary and affinity for psychological pablum as Hitchcock. Yet much like using a pipe wrench for an oil change, Shymalan's work doesn't come with the same sophistication or practical applications. Shymalan's fateful decision to eschew big-budget projects like The Last Airbender (2010) for smaller genre-niche movies has yielded some objectively better results over the last few years. He's still using the exact same formula that made him a household name, only now his clumsiness is seen as endearing or quirky in smaller movies. If one were to compare the found-footage proclivities of The Visit (2015) to the horrifyingly excessive The Happening (2008), you'd realize that the only real difference, is one actually knows it's a black comedy.
Split is simply more of the same - ominous atmospherics, pseudo-religious iconography, quasi-Jungian pop psychology and excessive brooding, all dialed up to eleven. Clearly never learning from his mistakes, Shymalan has also speckled in wind-baggy in-world explanations and redundant plot information, all but guaranteeing that audiences will burst out laughter before they cower in fear. Add to all that a complete inability to marry his technical abilities with a unifying tone and you got yourself a carnival full of cheap tricks and cheaper thrills.
Aiding in this carnival act is James McAvoy whose campy performance is fun to watch, if for no other reason than its so far beyond the pail of plausibility. Kevin is one of those characters that most actors secretly dream of doing because, while they may be broad and even offensive, they do supply facets of an actor's range. Plus, by the time one of the kidnap victims opens the files on all the personalities, Kevin's kinship to those suffering from Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is about as tangential as Pure Flix's kinship is to Christianity.
Out of all of Kevin's victims, Anya Taylor-Joy's outsider Casey has the easiest time adjusting to Kevin's solipsistic creep vacuum, allowing her characters lack of character color the background like the blank stare of a China doll. Her background, parceled in segments, does give reason for this; reasons that ultimately endear her to her kidnapper/s in the most unsettling of ways. While some may see her eventual fortitude as a source of strength, her inherent lack of agency throughout just reeks of exploitation.
By the end of the film, our fully-realized villain purports to bring salvation through suffering. Yet when you realize that you're not watching a bizzaro girls-in-peril kidnap movie but something else entirely, the suffering just becomes too unbearable.