Better Than It Has Any Right To Be

Rating: 7/10 (29 January 2017)

There's two ways to develop this "psycho character kidnaps a trio of teenage girls" type of plot . One is to make the girls and the audience squirm as they're subjected to all type of obscene practises in a torture porn type of tale . The other is to keep the horrors mainly psychological and understated and hope the actor playing the psycho isn't going to have too much fun in the role
The good news is that SPLIT isn't torture porn . Even better news is while James McAvoy has fun in the role it's never enough to actually take you out of the movie . McAvoy is of course a Scottish actor from a working class background and it's usually a distraction watching "one of us" in a commercial Hollywood movie but here McAvoy delivers a pivotal role playing a character suffering from dissociative identity disorder . Okay it's obvious no one had an eye on the Oscars when this was released and McAvoy's character pieces are a bit episodic along with being intermittently camp but even so the film rests mainly on this performance
!!!! TAKE NO CHANCES SUGGESTIVE SPOILER !!!!!
M Night Shyamalan is a director whose string of flops over the last few years have made the average audience member totally forget that he was once being touted as the new Spielberg and the temptation to do a sequel to one of his earlier regarded works must have been huge . Instead he concentrates on the understated psychological horrors of the predator and his prey in a slightly above average thriller . That said there is a twist involving self reference right at the very end which makes this above average thriller even more slightly above average