By Noel Vera
MOVIE REVIEW
Split
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN’S Split has taken in some $98 million in the United States and $140 million worldwide, all the sweeter considering the minuscule $9-million production budget (mostly self-financed), the years of commercial failure and critical abuse.
So Shyamalan’s back in a big way, and the question on all our minds is this: what have we bought into/welcomed back/recreated this time, exactly?
His last film, The Visit, was actually a fairly well-made thriller (arguably the best of the by-now almost completely degraded “found-footage” genre) and an impressive box office earner (with a budget of $5 million, any return of over $20 million would have been impressive).
Split is roughly in that mold. Three young girls — Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are kidnapped by a dour man with shaven pate who calls himself Dennis (James MacAvoy). Dennis suffers from an extreme form of Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly Multiple-Personality Disorder, and has at least 23 personalities, of which we see a handful. Mention is made of a 24th personality called “The Beast” — him you apparently don’t want to meet outside of a locked cage, with steel bars between you.
Shyamalan does several smart things: he takes care to introduce us to the three girls, then to Dennis and his several personalities. (We meet Patricia, a courteous host and stylish dresser; Hedwig, nine years old and not a little creepy; and Barry, a gay fashion designer [Stereotype much?].) We also meet Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley) who has been treating Dennis/Barry/Patricia/Hedwig, and wondering why Barry has been asking — urgently, desperately — to meet.
Aside from the visits to the therapist, most of the movie takes place in the warren of rooms and corridors that Dennis (we’ll stick to this name for the sake of convenience) operates in and apparently calls home. We get glimpses of a larger institution — old brick buildings, high iron gates — but can’t quite pinpoint the place other than somewhere in Philadelphia (Shyamalan was born in the Keystone State, and has set most of his features there).
It’s an evocative setup. The sealed rooms and dank corridors represent Dennis’s mind, full of twists and hidden corners; the camera’s often canted angles and use of close-ups evoke a sense of unrelenting claustrophobia (doesn’t help that the rooms are carefully lit to emphasize grey cement walls). Dennis himself recalls any number of film and literary figures, from Dr. Henry Jekyll to Norman Bates to Dr. Carter Nix — possibly representing the astonishing ability of the human mind to respond and adapt to trauma.
Helps that Shyamalan went so far as to research the condition with some thoroughness, calling it by its latest name instead of “multiple personality.” Helps that in Fletcher, he’s come up with an engaging character, a brave resourceful doctor genuinely concerned for her patients, with wit enough to suss out what Dennis is really up to.
Helps that Marcia and Claire while frightened do fight back, and at one point improvise an escape plan. Helps that Casey, smartest of the three youths, is patient enough to bide her time and chat up Hedwig, the most vulnerable of the personalities. These plot threads are not insignificant; to Shyamalan’s credit he subverts the stereotype of the malevolent male serial killer and his helpless female victim by giving the would-be killer a history of abuse (shown in terrifying flashbacks), gives his victims the ability to figure things out (or in Fletcher’s case figure Dennis out) for themselves.
It’s all crackerjack-crispy filmmaking right up to the point when (skip the next two paragraphs if you plan to see the movie!) The Beast makes his appearance, and instead of being an implied superman who just might transcend his animal instincts, he turns out to be your standard-issue carnivore, albeit with the combined powers of Spider-Man, Wolverine, and X-Men’s Beast. The narrative collapses into a mere chase picture with rather tepid conclusion (“Her heart is pure! The damaged are more evolved!”). Is Casey’s heart really more evolved because she’s been abused? Would be nice to think so, but where does this leave the others? And why raise the question of purity yet again, the determinant issue in most every slasher film (See: The Final Girl)?
Shyamalan has ended up cornered like this before: in The Visit he imagined the world’s most uncomfortable family outing, grandkids staying with grandparents for the first time because mother wants to go on a cruise with her boyfriend (Puritanical much?). The fact that the kids badly want to like their grandparents who are (to put it mildly) odd sets up all kinds of muddled expectations, ambivalent disappointments, emotional crosscurrents that would have been fascinating to untangle; instead Shyamalan opts for yet another Hansel-and-Gretel Gingerbread House horror flick, complete with corpses in the basement.
Avoiding the simplification that comes with thriller climaxes might mean less box office — but remember the budget was at most $10 million. If Shyamalan really followed through on his concept he might have ended up with 1.) a more modest commercial success, 2.) a more interesting (not to mention mature) work that just might be considered art… and 3.) a film less vulnerable to accusations of exploiting women in general, exploiting victims of Dissociative Identity Disorder in particular. A complex mental condition as basis for superpowers? How gauche; worse, how insensitive.
Which is Shyamalan’s real problem I think. He came up with a fairly original debut feature in The Sixth Sense, where a child sees dead people (liked the way he staged his scares, less fond of the cliched sound effects). Unbreakable is arguably my favorite, a slowly unfolding atmospheric little Gothic piece about a man’s gradual realization of his true nature. Ever since a pattern has been established to his pictures: intriguing premise, inventive developments, tension wound up to maximum; then something snaps — the characters are suddenly less intriguing, the action less inventive, the film falls apart and becomes, well, a mere horror thriller. Because that’s what Shyamalan does, horror thrillers; it’s what’s expected of him.
Interesting (again, skip this paragraph if you plan to see the film!) that the final scene links back to Unbreakable, the suggestion put out that maybe, just maybe, Shyamalan intends to create his own lower-budget more violent super-hero universe. Not perhaps the most fruitful direction to take one might argue — but it’s his favorite genre, his resurrected career. It’s as if the director were trapped in one of his own basements, scratching at doors, running down corridors, trying to find a way out of the trap he’s set for himself. You hope he makes it; you’re not confident he will.
