BurtonReviews Split: Are You Talking to Me?..Or Him?..Or Her?..Etcetera

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After just over a decade of awful box office and critical bombs such as the painful The Last Airbender in 2010 and the mind numbingly boring After Earth in 2013, the release of The Visit in 2015 seemed to declare M. Night Shyamalan’s return to actually well-crafted and enjoyable film making as he scaled back the scope of his films to bring a more relatable and engrossing edge to his films that seemed lacking in the past decade of his filmography. Now, with the release of Split, will M. Night be able to remain on this re-ascension to greatness, or falter once again? 

The story of Split sees three teenage girls: the outcast with obvious deep emotional issues, Anya Taylor-Joy as Cass Cooke, the popular girl who has never had to worry about anything in her life before, Haley Lu Richardson Claire Benoit, and her best friend, Jessica Sula as Marcia, are kidnapped by a sinister glasses wearing James McAvoy and taken to vague and eerily basic locked bedroom, with adjoining bathroom of course.  When McAvoy re-enters, this time wearing a dress and a whole new set of mannerisms and speech pattern, it is clear there is more to this hostage situation than it seems. And so the horror with a twist begins as the girls must escape from a man with 23 personalities all stuck in his head and fighting for dominance.

If there is anything that Split proves, it is that M. Night is back. With his hands all over both the directing and script writing for this movie, M. Night has crafted a truly fascinating and enthralling plot that had me constantly trying to figure out just how McAvoy’s character, or characters, worked as he skilfully unpeeled just enough of the mystery to have me biting-at-the-bit for more.

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The way the script effortlessly, and subtly, seeds in ideas and a whole new set of terms for his set of extremely intense circumstances is something surely to be commended. 

But the excellent scripting would have been for naught if there wasn’t an incredibly talented actor to bring to life a vast majority of these 23 unique personalities in a believable and distinguishable enough way. Thankfully with James McAvoy at the helm of this movie, this daunting task was in probably the best hands. While McAvoy has starred in a myriad of other films at this point, his stint as the young Professor X in the X Men franchise being one of many highlights, it is in Split that he really gets to tense his muscles, both figuratively and literally, as his range in performance, effortlessly switching from a disillusioned nine year old, to a sassy but firm middle-aged woman, then sliding perfectly into a man obsessed with the intricacies of history, was nothing less than astounding. McAvoy completely disappeared into his roles, at the attention to detail he put in to create such fleshed out, living, breathing facets of this man’s fractured psyche is not only commendable, but inspiring and has changed how I look at the actor from this point on.

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Another thing that has made me change how I look at the actor was just how damn unsettling he was in every single scene of this film. The unpredictability of who the three teenage girls were going to have to encounter next added to just how powerful McAvoy’s screen presence was each and every time he stepped on screen, instantly created this inescapable atmosphere of tension and as McAvoy commanded the room to his unnerving whim.

And it is this effect that McAvoy brings that makes it so when the events of the film really hit the fan, it is intense as all hell. In the brutal game of cat and mouse that the finale of this movie becomes, my heart was pounding out of my chest as the girls desperately tried to escape the many clutches of this unstoppable man, and even before all that, it feels as if the girls’ lives are always hanging on a thread and any influx in McAvoy’s current persona’s mood, or outburst of emotion could sound the end of one hostage’s life.

Overall M. Night is definitely back, and if this fascinating story that never allows you to settle into peace or quiet as the characters are always dangled on a knifes edge, coupled with McAvoy’s awe inspiring range of characters and acting chops, doesn’t prove that to you, I don’t know what will.

Split = 8.5/10

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Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed!