24 Frames of Mind

Rating: 4/10 (7 October 2019)

Although some critics and fans--backed up by box-office receipts--claimed this as writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's comeback, "Split" is nevertheless an exploitative, derivative and incongruent horror movie. Like some of Shyamalan's other post-"The Sixth Sense" (1999) debacles, one can see how it could've been a better picture had the project not been of such an errant mind--straying all over the place--and, ultimately, relying upon a series of clichÃ©s--most blatant of which is the filmmaker's trademark twist endings.
There's a lot of trash here: it's yet another movie about a psycho abducting, holding captive and terrorizing people--usually young women or teenage girls. Dissociative identity disorder is exploited for the fear of people with mental illness (although, I suppose, it's good that filmmakers seem to have finally learned that schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personalities--good riddance "Sybil" (1976)). Sexual abuse is exploited for some screwy, Nietzschian moralizing regarding that which doesn't kill you only making you stronger. Both the mental illness and the child abuse are tied into Shyamalan's usual pseudo-religious supernaturalism. And, perhaps worst of all, the supernatural here extends to one of the most flagrantly contrived and tacked-on surprise endings when "Split" is tied-in to a shared universe with "Unbreakable" (2000), via a cameo from Bruce Willis in an utterly stilted scene, and setting up the subsequent cap to the trilogy, "Glass" (2019). The coda of "10 Cloverfield Lane" (2016), another movie about a young woman trapped with a nutcase, almost seems organic by comparison. Perhaps only "The Mummy" (2017), in failing to launch the Dark Universe, has done so poorly in recent memory to establish a shared cinematic universe and been such an excruciating example of MCU piggybacking.
Of all the divergent threads here, the one I think was promising was the potential self-reflexive allusion to cinema. "Unbreakable" succeeded in this respect by reference to comic books, and "Glass" extends this further cinematically. Several elements for something similar are presented in "Split"--beginning with the actor/spectator dichotomy established at the outset with the well-made abduction scene. Although the main girl, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), is first seen as an object to be viewed, as the other two girls and one of their dads look on, the abduction scene places her firmly as the watcher, or the surrogate spectator for us movie-goers. The other two girls are oblivious nitwits throughout. A series of car mirror shots and obscured views from Casey's point-of-view support this. James McAvoy's madman is the actor in both senses: that his actions tend to advance the plot and that his split personalities form a performance for Casey to observe--whether to see his reinterpretation of Norman Bates from "Psycho" (1960) through a crack in a door or to watch him dance by invitation.
He also makes webcam movies of his various personalities, which Casey views. In fact, this is what helps set her free. Yorgos Lanthimos made this self-reflexive connection much better in "Dogtooth" (2009), another and far-more-disturbing and intelligently-made film about captivity and perversity. In "Dogtooth," the captivity of the characters became a metaphor for the spectator's illusion of being held captive by the film itself. In "Split," however, one wonders whether Shyamalan even meant to do anything that wasn't entirely superficial. For instance, I doubt the reason McAvoy's character has 24 personalities has anything to do with classic film having been photographed at 24 frames per second--especially given how far removed movies are from such standards (like most movies nowadays, "Split" is all digital), and, besides, we only see McAvoy portray six of those characters. One could just as well read in an equally pointless exercise in numerology that 24 refers to the number of hours in a day.
Additionally, the Beast personality hinted at the promise of "King Kong" (1933)-like self-referentiality--where the monster's attack from a stage after being captured by filmmakers suggests his being analogous to cinema. Thus, it might have been intriguing had Casey emerged from beneath a movie theatre instead of--of all things--from a zoo. (They're all held captive--get it?) On second thought, for a movie and script that is this crowded and unfocused--like a zoo, as the idiom goes--that may be the most appropriate setting.