The most entertaining BAD movie in years. It's certainly never boring, but...

Rating: 6/10 (27 January 2017)

Split is a film that asks you to suspend your disbelief, and at first, even after the many films that this director has done where he goes way too far, I was with Split for about the first half of the way through, or maybe more. I knew logically this is not how DID works (Disassociative Identity Disorder), but hey, it's a movie, let's go with it. And to Shyamalan's credit, he casts the two major parts to the point where it's key and it works. And as a director, overall, and in large part thanks to the cinematographer behind It Follows, it's a film directed with real terror and suspense. It's low-budget, largely a 'bottle' film, and he uses his money with true style. It's paced well... where was I (now I feel like I got this disorder and will become two different critics here, gotta control...)
Oh, yeah, James McAvoy, he's fantastic. He may not be playing 23 personalities in total, but the ones that Shyamalan focuses on are developed enough - among them is Barry (a gay fashion designer that McAvoy sort of plays like a young Pacino or something, in the physicality), Dennis (the one who may seem to be in 'control' and is extremely OCD about any dirt) and Hedwig (who is nine years old, and you can tell) - give McAvoy enough room to explore these personalities. There's times of awkward laughter at first, but this gives way to seeing that McAvoy is so committed to these characters, and is pulling them all of with intensity and charm and disbelief and a madness that is kind of similar to them all, that he's impossible to dislike.
Another key player is Ana Taylor Joy, as she's the one of the three girls that we get to know the most (though with this we get into something of a, for me, forced motivation, but I'll get to that later), and she is on for all of these interactions with McAvoy. She's the one who can somehow speak to Hedwig sympathetically and connect with him, and when she is freaking out and trying to hold things inside, she does this perfectly. Between this and The VVitch she is really on a roll as a major actress for thrillers - she can play terrified, but being in control and being bad-ass works as well. And for a lot of the scenes the actress playing the psychiatrist, Betty Buckley, is believable, as far as she can take the lines to...
Okay, here's where we get into the DID here with this movie in reality, it's with its writer AND then also its director. I don't mean the same person, I mean they are separate entities. Shyamalan the director is on top of his game here, with a formal rigor that hasn't clicked this week in well over a decade (it may even connect to Unbreakable, which... oh, more on that at the end of this). Shyamalan the *writer* is something else. He's still someone who thinks he's oh, so, so clever, and you know what? For that first half or so, he kind of is. At least, again, when it comes to the suspension-of-disbelief factor. He does a more than competent job of giving us a believable enough set-up with these girls being held captive, Barry putting up his false front when emailing but then denying anything is wrong to the doctor, and then how the personalities have their splits with the girls and how they are trying (unsuccessfully to escape)... but then Shyamalan the writer gets greedy. Or insane. Or both.
The biggest problem here is that this man is CHEATING by the end of this, and in a way that is baffling. He can't have enough with having this somewhat preposterous thriller about a man juggling all these personalities that may lead up to "The Beast", the 24th personality. No, it needs to be deeper than that. It also needs to involve child molestation - not just with this man, but the Ana Taylor Joy character when she was younger - and that this, uh, maybe leads into having these super DID powers(!?) He's creating a whacked-out mythology where one needn't exist, and by the time the third act takes off, and you can mark it as soon as the Buckley character comes to Barry/Dennis/Hedwig/Patricia/Et-Al's basement dwelling, it fully goes into bananas territory.
I know, I know, it's a thriller, I know I should keep buying into what this is selling... but I just couldn't. Most of all (oh, hell, you got this far in this review) it's the gall to turn this around to make this as part of a, uh, Shyamalan Cinematic Universe with a Bruce Willis Unbreakable cameo that brings me into the 'you're cheating!' territory. Perhaps this is simply this man's M.O. as far as crafting his material, that he can see ahead and know that this is what he has to do, and that everything ties together... or he wrote himself into a corner, realized he was writing sheer insanity as far as where McAvoy goes in this final third, and had to cover up. Either way, it might work for you... or it may feel like him f***ing with all of us. At any rate, all of the material with The Beast has the sensation of Shyamalan as mad mainstream provocateur, like 'hey, how far can I actually take this stuff, you've come this far right, eh, right? RIGHT?!'
To his credit, this is a more enjoyable piece of madness than The Village, and its final third makes it something I want to revisit simply to show friends in a 'Look upon this wonder in awe' way like The Happening. I think among the Shyamalan *bad* movies, and this is bad make no mistake, it's directed like a pro and the actors are all on their game, and becomes the best of them.