Split (dir. M. Night. Shyamalan, 2016) — Review

M. Night Shyamalan undulates manically between disaster and brilliance. Like a vintage kilo thrifter, the erstwhile writer-director scoops up flashy armfuls of filmic tat, veering wildly across genre and subject matter, traditionally effecting his trademark plot twist to turn the whole wobbling confection into a triumph. Call it laziness or genius; the piles of cash that his creations have raked in, alternating with critical and commercial ire, suggest that at some level, he knows how to please an audience — even if that knowledge has come, in equal part, from vehement rejection.

At its worst, Shyamalan fare is trashy, incoherent, unwieldy; at best, it comes off as compelling. But also still trashy. In the case of Split, a jolt of oxygen amidst one of the auteur’s traditional ‘low periods’, he bets on two stars James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy just about capable to drag this lunatic idea across the line — good taste be damned.

Split — a standalone stealth-sequel to Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000) — is pure, unapologetic exploitation; yet its weirdly rarified form speaks to the finger that Shyamalan holds to the pulse of audience tastes, particularly in the delicate crossing from the 2010s to the 2020s. Considering the centrality of the filmmaker to anything in his output — the self-referential narcissism that has carried him through three decades of box-office bipolarity — it seems fitting that he should cross that bridge with a two-hander for a pair of virtuosic stars in the Gen-Z canon, which parlays ‘multiple personality disorder’, and its fundamental concern with identity, into a juicy psychological horror.

Shyamalan emerges from his dumpster dive with two brilliant actors whose talents carry his macabre, perverted sideshow fascination into the realm of ‘entertainment’. McAvoy and Taylor-Joy aren’t totally unsupported in their efforts, however; in picking up a yarn about a serial killer with Dissociative Identity Disorder, and blending it into the rich metatextual arena of supervillain/superhero origin mythology, Shyamalan executes a masterstroke of well-judged bad taste.

Split concerns a man with, like, twenty-four split personalities, who kidnaps three scantily-clad, whimpering teenage girls and imprisons them in an underground bunker beneath the Boston zoo. With its trifecta of mental illness, sexualisation, and utterly flippant reliance on childhood abuse storylines, Split really should have raised some eyebrows even amidst the obnoxious excesses of 2016. And yet, to the contrary, the film garnered both commercial and critical acclaim. Yoking himself to the fortunes of saucer-eyed upstart Anya Taylor-Joy, and quirky old-guard Scotsman Ewan McGregor, Shyamalan demonstrated, once again, his incredible canniness at seizing on the sweet spot between horrendous ick and dollar-dollar-bill-yall titillation. In this respect, he might even deserve a nod towards the tradition of Agatha Christie and other pulpy titans of days gone by: an eye for turning sensitive, visceral subjects into popcorn-chomping spectacle, casting morality by the wayside in favor of compelling characters and a jolt of adrenaline.

Telling, too, that for a film about a (spoiler) genus of superhumans with the power of weaponizing multiple identities, Split turns its lesser characters into literal human fodder. And yet, like the actors and the entertainment machine that produced it, the film invites us to exult in doing so with lashings of schadenfreude. The only characters — presences really — that matter in this film are Kevin (McAvoy) and Casey (Taylor-Joy), the sole significant force amongst the anonymous imprisoned teens; embellished by Kevin’s therapist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Broadway titan Betty Buckley).

In a significant sense, Kevin and Casey turn out career-distilling performances for their actors. The fact that these performances emerge in service of an utterly cringe-inducing narrative seems, weirdly, to augment their conviction. Discussion of exploitation films of the 60s and 70s — a genre which made the most of relaxed American censorship laws to splatter as much sex, blood, and violence over the screen as physically possible — has thrown up a similar question; the line between these offerings and ‘arthouse’ films made in Europe in the same period wobbles perilously thin. Split is by no stretch of the imagination an arthouse film. Yet, like the exploitation films which laid down the conventions of the horror genre which Shyamalan works so expertly, it contains lashings of technical expertise.

We join Kevin, a likeable but deeply troubled man with two dozen repressed personalities, at the start of a journey which teeters, deliciously, between real-life mental health crisis and supernatural fantasy — I say deliciously not from personal taste, but in view of the unabated voyeuristic rapaciousness for this fare which has played out this week with Kanye West’s unhinged online harrassment of his ex-wife . Despite all the sensitivity training and heightened awareness that allegedly separates us from the days of paid entrance to the Bedlam asylum in the eighteenth century, goggling over insanity — literally demonising mental illness — remains as lucrative a sideshow as ever.

Kevin — McAvoy working his puppy dog eyes to maximum effect — struggles with DID as a result of childhood abuse and abandonment, but has battled his twenty-three other personalities into functionality with the help of Dr Fletcher. The most dominant of these alters, "Barry", has been struggling to fight problematic weirdos off the aux of late: specifically “Dennis”, who fixates on young girls, and "Patricia", who harbingers a shady being called “The Beast" with plans to rid the world of the “impure” — those without trauma.

Exploitative? Oh hell yes. And yet weirdly prescient of the ‘trauma Olympics’ which characterize personality cult struggles in the present day — particularly with the popularity of ‘alters’ and DID ‘influencers’ on social media. In fact, M. Night’s vulturish choice of mental disorder seems particularly savvy considering the continuing uproar over the proportion of fakers in the community.

With any toehold on the moral high-ground thus flung to the wind, Split gets into its real meat and gristle: Kevin genially bundles three adolescents — mean girls Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula), plus Casey, a pity invite — into his car as they wait to head to a birthday party. Imprisoned in his zoo-bunker, the trio must manipulate his various alters into letting them escape, with predictable results.

Predictable in some ways, that is: the mean girls get in their underwear, throw tantrums, and suffer grisly demises. Yet the bond between Kevin (or rather his alters) and Casey, though exploitative, makes surprising departures from the status quo, in more ways than the trademark Shayalaman one.

Exploiting his characters’ disadvantaged backgrounds with the gleeful efficiency of an Amazon warehouse supervisor, Shyamalan and his two marquee stars extract an interesting result, one that, planned or not, has ultimately served not only to bridge chapters of the M. Night Metaverse, but the changing tastes of box-office punters.