Should've known better than to trust shamalamadingdong again

Rating: 3/10 (28 January 2017)

Have never wrote a review before on IMDb but logged in just to comment on how inexplicably bad this is. First of all, how is this crap film getting 9/10s and 8/10s? I am genuinely asking because I cannot comprehend how anyone who has seen this film would rate it in that manner. I got duped by all the favorable reviews praising M.Night's new thriller and walked into the cinema with great hopes, shining, bountiful hopes, despite the utter tragedies of the films he had directed before. It seemed like a great concept, DID + James McAvoy? I was so ready for this.
Now a big portion of why this didn't work out was because of the script. It had all the hallmarks of amateurish writing. Gaping plot holes, corny and cheesy dialogue, scenes that made you want to scream at the characters for making extremely poor decisions etc. One of my biggest gripes were that the 3 main personalities they crafted for James McAvoy seemed to be very stereotypical. You had the uptight, OCD, neat-freak Dennis, the tranquil Patricia, constantly wearing a shawl to convince us of her innate zen-ness and finally, Hedwig, a 9 year-old with a crippling case of the lisp, yadda yadda ya, he has his precocious moments as most children do, nothing very interesting. Hedwig was also oft used as a plot device to inject humour into the film, I did not think they meshed well with the overall tone of the movie, scenes where he popped up were enjoyable but at the same time felt more like a tick off the checklist, the attempts to introduce levity throughout the film did not flow well and felt contrived. I would say McAvoy did a great job with the material he was given but bad writing is after all, bad writing. The stilted dialogue didn't help things at all. The 3 teenaged girls did not fare well on the acting front as well. I have watched Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch and she did pretty good there so it was somewhat puzzling to see her performance in this movie, granted it was better than the other 2 but it was still rather lacking. I would've thought being captured by a deranged madman would have been much more frightening than how it was portrayed in the film.
Going into the third act of the film, the psychiatrist made some extraordinarily bad decisions, including investing too much into a patient, visiting a patient with 23 personalities, some rather dubious in character, in the middle of the night. By herself. Without informing anyone else. Really? Fast forward into the film and she's been drugged by Dennis. The first thing she does upon awakening is to write down the full name of Kevin, which we know is the one thing that is capable of pulling him into the light and giving him the power of his own body. She, however does not utter the name when the Beast is attacking her, does not even bother to say it as she tries to stab him unsuccessfully over a long drawn out moment. Yes, the Beast was squeezing her torso/mid body but she could still have said something (the way he constricted her body did not make it seem that she was unable to speak), knowing this was the only fail-proof way to get Kevin to return.
Another gripe was the supernatural element of the film. The way they introduced the Beast felt so terribly banal and cliché. Veins bulging out of his body, ripping his shirt off, fleeing across urban landscapes in the dark, climbing and scaling buildings. It was like a watered down hulk? Hulk-lite? It wouldn't have felt out of place in a cheesy superhero flick at all. Except that it attempted to be a serious psychological thriller which makes me want to scream why, over and over again at the screen.
And don't even get me started on the ending. (from the point that they discovered the girl) It went from a 5/10 to a 3/10. Some people enjoyed the Unbreakable reference, I found it exceedingly stupid, a cheap easter egg gimmick they threw in at the end of the film to give fans something to salivate over. Overall, I thought it had an interesting premise and extremely bad execution. Stop giving M.Night future projects. Stop indulging him in the same kind of shitshow he's been making for years. And for Christ's sake, if he's going to be making movies, please hire an actual capable writer to write the damn script and dialogue.
TL; DR: Pros- McAvoy's performance, cinematography Cons- Everything else