I think it’s fair to say that director M. Night Shyamalan has had a variable track record to date. After his big break, The Sixth Sense, made a new sport out of guessing-the-twist, he seemed to have landed straight at the top and seemed likely to stay there – but subsequent films saw this influence wane, with offerings such as Lady in the Water dividing fans and more recent efforts, namely The Last Airbender, uniting them again – mostly in derision. (I’ll admit I haven’t seen The Last Airbender, though whenever faced with Shyamalan’s most twee efforts, I always feel like Michael Jackson’s Earth Song is about to break out.) So, this brings us to his new film, the recently-released Split (2016), which features no spooks, no mysterious realms and no crop circles. On paper, it certainly seems like a concerted effort has been made to head in a new direction – but just how complete, and successful, is this departure?
In many respects, Split really does constitute different fare. For starters, it uses an accepted – if very rare – psychological condition as the basis of its story. Dissociative identity disorder, which is probably better-known by its older name of ‘multiple personality disorder’, involves a person’s sense of self fragmenting into several different and distinct characters, each of whom can come to the fore at different times. Whether done well or done badly, mental illnesses have long been used as plot points in cinema, though this particular identity disorder has usually been approached from the perspective of the other personalities being represented to the audience as separate actors – and, hey, there we have it, a fair few of those twist endings mentioned above. The approach to DID taken by Split is rather different, and far more ambitious. Furthermore, as we’ll see, the early storyline ostensibly has far more in common, surprisingly, with modern ordeal horror than with Shyamalan’s earlier work.
The story begins with three teenage girls leaving a birthday party. Two are of the pampered/popular variety: Claire, whose birthday it’s been (Haley Lu Richardson), and her best friend Marcia (Jessica Sula), talk privately about how uncool it is that they had to invite Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), who seems to have ‘final girl’ written on her head in permanent marker from the outset. Casey’s ride home hasn’t arrived, so Claire’s dad offers to drop her home. He starts to load the back of the car with gifts as the two popular girls get in the back and start to thumb through Instagram. This is the reason they don’t notice that a completely different man then gets into the car, renders them unconscious with a handy spray, then drives them to an unknown location.
The girls awake confined in a small, underground room which has a very attractive fitted bathroom, but is otherwise a cell. The man (James McAvoy) returns, grabs one of them and takes her out of the room (what on earth does he do to her for twenty seconds?) but otherwise, they are left unharmed. When the man later returns with completely different mannerisms, the girls slowly being to understand that he has psychological issues – but they are still in the dark about what he, or they plan to do with them. Meanwhile, one of the personalities, ‘Barry’, is dropping in for unscheduled psych appointments with Dr. Fletcher (the excellent Betty Buckley – best-known for playing Miss Collins in Carrie). Dr. Fletcher has been working with the various personalities who occupy this man for many years, and she’s wary of this sudden change in behaviour; Barry, or one of others, has been sending her terse emails in the middle of the night, asking for her help. It seems that change is coming, and Dr Fletcher feels she’s the only one who can get to the bottom of it all. What she doesn’t know, however, is that the dominant personalities already know what they must do.
The film starts strong, with some moments that made me sit up and pay attention; I was impressed with the way the girls don’t notice their plight for several minutes because they’re glued to their mobiles, making it a very modern observation, and it makes me think that if the whole ‘no signal’ thing is such a common motif in horror, then the phenomenon of people who never look up from their phones must be ready to be exploited by now. Then, when captured, the initial Hollywood-friendly intimations from two of the girls that they are gonna kick some ass and escape are talked down by Casey, who is savvy enough to realise that a couple of mall karate classes won’t quite cut it in this situation. Perhaps we’ve reached saturation point for the whole ‘eight-stone woman, strength of Hercules thing’ which has become par for the course in cinema; it makes people feel good, but it jars against the gritty realism which many films aim for.
Not that ‘gritty realism’ is the order of the day here, though, despite Shyamalan’s initial premise being based in fact. He can’t quite help himself, it seems, and pushes the DID narrative so far, it practically morphs into the supernatural – bringing it ultimately far closer to his earlier work, and taking it a long way from the film’s beginnings. We eventually find ourselves with an almost omniscient psychiatrist in Dr Fletcher, whose abilities know very few bounds, and who functions as the ‘lady psychic’ in a number of ways – reading the situation, before intervening, using her arcane knowledge to try and restore normality. There’s even what I’d consider a ‘magic word’. Then, the level of difference between the different personalities being exhibited moves from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from there into supernatural territory. The film’s climax definitely transcends the real, clustering everything out-of-the-ordinary you may have ever heard of regarding DID and encapsulating it in one place and a number of key scenes.
I realise I’m listing the issues here; this certainly doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the film. I actually did, despite feeling that it was a stylistic mish-mash in places. But the film’s success rests entirely on the performance of James McAvoy, who does a brilliant job with the sophisticated and tricky things he has been asked to do. This could have been a disaster – could have even been laughable – but McAvoy’s preparation must have been as intense as the end result is impressive. As I’ve written about the film above, I’ve realised how often I’ve referred to different personalities, or to ‘they’ – this is by merit of McAvoy’s performance, who via some subtle facial expressions and different intonation has made it all seem possible to follow and to understand. He’s given different ‘accessories’ to wear, but I don’t really think this was necessary. He’s chiefly up against Anya Taylor Joy, who played Tomasin in last year’s excellent The Witch, though this feels a slightly flatter performance for her this time around. Much of this is not her fault. Lots of her characterisation is achieved through flashbacks to childhood, which sat a little uncomfortably with me at first, and may have taken her out of the tension to a degree – as well as using rather heavy brush strokes to tell us she has some skills she’ll rely on in the present moment. That said, as the film progressed, these scenes added context which definitely did count, and did allow for one or two surprises. The other young actresses do well and behave fairly believably – though there are some pretty spurious reasons for them getting their clothes off here (though not too many clothes are removed; naive attitudes to sexuality are occasionally peppered throughout the film.)
That all said, the pace of this film is solid, and it doesn’t descend into sentimentality, or anything else which would derail the whole proceedings. In fact, it has the guts to dodge the most obvious resolution, and ties up a few loose ends towards its close in an interesting way (there’s even a key cameo at the end, though I’m not too sure end-shot cameos ever offer that much more than lip service to the most ardent of fans.) Overall, Split is a film which has worked hard to do something different, and, with a few caveats, it’s largely successful. Mr McAvoy’s methods of bringing trauma to life may just have pulled it around for Shyamalan.