Originally written on January 27, 2017

M. Night Shyamalan is starting to have an interesting career trajectory. His first three movies (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs) were pretty well received, but after that it just seemed to go downhill. People were a little lukewarm on movies like The Village, and then just winded up hating movies like The Last Airbender and After Earth. However, 2015 saw a bit of a return to form for the director with The Visit. Despite it looking pretty good, people were understandably very skeptical of the movie considering how disappointing M. Night Shyamalan has been in recent years. However, the movie was actually pretty decent. I figured this would just be a one-time good movie from him again, but now we’ve arrived at Split, and the movie is even better than The Visit was. It might be too early to say, but M. Night Shyamalan may be back to making good movies again.

I think a big thing for M. Night Shyamalan might just be that he only really excels in movies that are psychological thriller/horror kinds of movies, which is what Split is. The movie begins with three teenage girls that get kidnapped by a man. While trying to figure out how to escape, they begin to notice that something weird is up with their captor. They hear him having conversations with himself and taking on completely different personalities. It’s then revealed that this man has dissociative identity disorder, otherwise known as having split personalities. The main hub of the man, Kevin, has 23 different distinct personalities. We see some of these personalities take shape, but as the girls are trying to figure out how to escape, a threat is starting to emerge where Kevin’s personalities are revealing that a new, very dangerous 24th personality is about to take shape soon.

I found the movie to be just interesting more than anything else. Seeing all of the different personalities that James McAvoy takes on is pretty cool, and he delivers a great performance with all of them. In fact, one of my biggest complaints is simply that we only get to see about a third of the different personalities. I realize the movie might have gotten a bit too muddled or confusing if it featured all 23 personalities, but I was kind of hoping to see a few more than we got. Aside from this, my only other real complaint is that there are some plot elements that aren’t really explained very well in the movie, so it is a bit uneven at times. However, other than that the movie really is a pretty thrilling ride. I liked seeing people interact with the different personalities, and I actually found myself getting invested in the girls’ escape. While it might not be one of the best movies out there, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had with Split.

4/5