Feels like a first draft, albeit one with strong performances and decent premise

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2019)

It was the recent release of Glass that made me decide to watch this film, despite its so-so reviews; I wanted to watch the former, and it didn't feel right to skip right to it. The film opens with a creepy setup, and gradually plays out the multiple personalities of the main characters, while at the same time increasing the tension through the peril of the young women trapped somewhere. In terms of stakes and tension, it mostly does it well, with an escalation as the film goes, but the film is not tight enough to be event driven, and at two hours there is lots of material which seemed intended to do something, but mostly doesn't deliver.
It is an odd film in this way, because there is a lot here to work with, but too much of it is superficial. It plays very much like a first or second draft; so for example there are elements so undercooked that it feels like the type of material that would have been taken out later down the road to try to make more space for other elements, or just recognizing that it adds time but not value. Casey's flashbacks add almost nothing - not because they are a bad idea, but because they are not worked through enough; the film would have lost almost nothing by removing them. Likewise, the battle within the main character doesn't have a sense of struggle really; it could have been much more, and thus the conclusion could have been more impacting, but it doesn't have much in the way of weight or emotion behind it. Again, there was much more writing and refining to be done here.
It is a shame, because the cast deserve more than they have to work with. McAvoy is great as he slips between characters totally convincingly; he throws himself into this and almost singlehandedly makes the film worth seeing. Taylor-Joy is almost as good because of how she plays her fear; while the film doesn't help the viewer connect to her 5-year old self, the actresses seems to have found it, and there is more in her performance than the film lets us see. Probably the blame should be laid at the feet of Shyamalan; he wrote and directed this, and it is very his type of weakness - he wants the concept and idea to be the thing, but the depth etc he is not often able to find. The film running long and having too much in it is probably down to him too - editor Ciarrocchi seems to have his career thanks to Shyamalan, so he is unlikely to be tough in the edit.
Split squanders a lot - a couple of very good performances, and a generally interesting concept and through-line mostly. It lays out its plot in semi-cooked chunks and then serves them up like an early draft - some of it needed chucking, and the rest needed improving; but it doesn't do either.