Not too many directors have taken so many career hits than the still-unreplaceable M. Night Shyamalan. For a time there it seemed that as the master of the suspenseful and the imaginative, the man who brought the likes of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, could not lose. The problem that befell Shyamalan is the same that happens to most directors when they get to a certain level: they end up trying to compete with themselves and in the process, get intoxicated by the power and goodwill given to them by audiences and studios.
It seemed there was little to salvage Shyamalan’s career following the direness of The Last Airbender and After Earth, both career missteps that will surely be nowhere to be seen come career tribute time. But the Shyamalan-produced Devil showed that the director still had an eye for story while last year’s surprise hit The Visit called on some of the filmmaker’s greatest strengths as a storyteller: namely his ability to mix the personal with the horrific. Now along comes this year’s much-buzzed Split, a film which, although brimming with a pedigree much better than January at the multiplex deserves, is just not up to par with the Shyamalan resurgence of late.
In Split, Casey (Anna Taylor-Joy), Marcia (Jessica Sula) and Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), a trio of high school girls, are waiting to be driven home by the latter’s father after celebrating a birthday party. Without warning, a man (James McAvoy), who has just attacked Claire’s dad climbs into the front seat, drugs all three girls and takes them to a secluded location. When they awake, they discover themselves trapped by the man who claims to be one of 24 different personalities. After a while it becomes vital that the girls learn which of the man’s many different personalities they can trust, and which they cannot.
Despite an intriguing premise, one which should provide more of an artistic platform than it does, Split just outright fails to come together. The main reason for this is that we aren’t really given much insight into the different sorts of personalities that exist in the main character, beyond just base traits and quirks. As an audience we can only see McAvoy try on a number of voices or watch the girls cower in fear whenever the door to their prison is opened a finite number of times before the suspense diminished. The director admirably tries to make up for this by taking us outside his captor’s lair in a couple of subplots. The first follows the main character’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley) as she is endlessly trying to decipher what about her patient seems more different than usual. In the second, the director takes us into Casey’s past childhood in a bid to help us understand how she is the way she is. While the two side trips do offer some well-needed breaks from the main storyline, both eventually outstay their welcome, thus showing the true cracks in Split’s story.
The biggest sin of all that Split commits is that it just isn’t that much fun. The one thing that can be unanimously agreed upon regarding Shyamalan’s past films, however flawed, was that there was always something very playful or intriguing about them. The sight of people suddenly taking their own lives in an ordinary city in The Happening or the collection of oddball tenants teaming up to solve a mystery in Lady in the Water, all sizzled with movie lover’s desire and knack for imagination. There is nothing similarly fun about Split. The film spends too much time trying to explain its subject’s condition to the point where we aren’t sure if we should pity or fear him, plunging the story and its characters into incredibly dark territory as a result. When backstories are explored, the movie stops being fun altogether as Shyamalan has taken his film far beyond entertainment and into the kind of terrain that leaves a bad taste in an audience member’s mouth once it’s over.
While all of the actors do well, this is McAvoy’s film from start to finish. The actor dominates every scene and every type of persona he’s asked to embody and runs the gamut from a proper British lady to a precocious 9-year-old boy. The actor is so mesmerizing that the handful of scenes he isn’t in are dreaded by the audience who are waiting for him to turn up again. Always proven to be a fine actor, Split is McAvoy’s Shining, giving him what will no doubt be the most tour-de-force role he will ever have.
It’s always tricky when well-known directors try to use their profession to play psychologist, trying to elevate themselves to a higher level both artistically and critically. Oftentimes these efforts are quickly shut down. The most obvious example of this is Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, the master’s self-proclaimed “sex mystery” which, although somewhat appreciated by fans today, remains a slightly laughable bit of pop psychology. The same will no doubt be said for Split in the future due to its director believing that the more explicit he makes the content, the more in touch with the subject he actually is. The problem isn’t just that he’s nowhere close, but he’s also forgotten to enjoy himself along the way.
