Shyamalan's career takes a new twist

Being as diplomatic as humanly possible, M. Night Shyamalan has become a pretty divisive filmmaker. It’s been almost two decades since his breakthrough, The Sixth Sense, and after an impressive string of critical and financial successes, it’s fair to say things haven’t gone to plan since. With its fantastically eerie atmosphere, confident execution, and killer twist (I still consider it one of the greatest twist endings ever put to screen), The Sixth Sense was quite the calling card to Hollywood from a rookie director still wet behind the ears.

Follow up such outrageous success is no mean feat, but Unbreakable and Signs saw Shyamalan fine tuning and expanding his act in intriguing ways. It wasn’t to last, however, and the bubble soon burst as his winning formula began to spoil and a succession of truly abysmal efforts saw the director’s stock fall rapidly. The concepts were becoming old, the atmospherics stale, and the signature twists growing ever more predictable.

After the unmitigated disasters of The Last Airbender and After Earth, things looked bleak. This is, until 2015’s The Visit saw the director make an unexpected return to something resembling form and to the well that’d brought him his initial success. With confidence evidently renewed, this spike in form for Shyamalan looks set to continue with Split; a movie that, while far from perfect, show’s enough promise to suggest a full-blown M. Night renaissance is on the cards.

After attending a friend’s birthday party, three teen girls - Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), Marcia (Jessica Sula) and Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) - are kidnapped in broad daylight. Their captor, Kevin (James McAvoy), imprisons the trio in a room with nothing but two beds and a bathroom; proceeding to torment them through his various personas, all connected to his dissociative identity disorder. To escape captivity, the girls must navigate the fragile maze of Kevin’s 23 separate distinctive personalities and convince one of them to set them free before the arrival of his 24th, and most dangerous, personality – the “beast”.

For better or worse, Split is an M. Night Shyamalan masterclass. Within its relatively tight running time, the film manages to encapsulate both the good and the irksome in the director’s particular brand of filmmaking. While Split may tempt many lost souls back into Shyamalan’s following, for those whose faith in the director has long since disappeared, this is unlikely to be the film to convince them that he’s changed.

Bolstered by Shyamalan’s trademark, off-kilter atmosphere and James McAvoy’s disconcerting performance, Split gets off to a very promising start as we’re dealt a swift, gut-punch of an abduction scene and wake with the three young victims in Kevin’s dingy, subterranean prison. It’s an opening of brutality, menace, and intrigue that’s up there with the director’s finest work, but it soon becomes clear that the film is poorly equipped to sustain such momentum.

As Split moves through its second and third acts, things steadily fall flat and, while the many twists and turns are enough to keep intrigue levels up, the suspense built up by the film’s opening soon fades as things become easier and easier to flag.

It has become a common M. Night Shyamalan complaint that his twists have become more a distraction than any form of useful narrative device; forcing the viewer into a constant guessing game with the plot and, consequently, pulling them out of the film altogether. With The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, the twists felt organic but, with every passing film, these plot U-turns have become nothing but cheap, predictable parlour tricks. Unfortunately, Split continues this bad habit, as the director drops one of his clumsiest and contrived endings to date. There’s little doubting the twist’s surprise when it arrives, however, when it’s launched with all the grace of a brick through a window, it all feels rather ridiculous.

Split certainly has lofty intentions to balance out its a schlocky premise but, while the ambitions to explore some extremely complex mental health issues are to be applauded, Shyamalan just doesn’t have the filmmaking wit about him to successfully navigate the issues raised and, consequently, the film never really sticks its landing. The film’s entire hook rides on Kevin’s dissociative personality disorder but, what could’ve been the catalyst for some thought-provoking discussions into the subject, quickly descends into a shallow mental illness caricature.

While McAvoy gives his all to his character and their varied personalities, they often amount to little more than the kind clichéd, cartoonish ticks that, as a representation of mental illness, you’d think we would have moved past by now. At its heart, Split is a rather pulpy, genre affair and, as such, clearly lacks the desire to delve too deep into such a complex subject but that still doesn’t excuse the fact that we’re being offered a portrait of mental health that’s done for freakish kicks than anything substantive. It’s a massive shame as there are many genuinely interesting issues raised throughout the film but it all plays out like a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde with little depth.

The issues with mental health are systematic of the film’s problems and, while there’s much to admire in Shyamalan’s ambitions, the director consistently struggles to maintain his grip on Split’s hard-hitting subject matter. The film’s attempt at tackling abduction and abuse feels misguided at best, falling well below recent efforts like Room or 10 Cloverfield Lane in digging into the dark heart of such a grueling issue. Combining dissociative identity disorder with a hostage thriller is an intriguing hook to build your film around but, rather than use this as a foundation to build upon, Split repeatedly stops short of its potential while reaching for cheap thrills instead.

Women as victims in such a film as Split is absolutely nothing new instead of attempting to challenge such a well-worn trope, Shyamalan instead pushes things to their absolute limit; putting his three female protagonists through the ringer to the point of discomfort for the audience. While Anya Taylor-Joy’s Casey is given a relatively strong, substantial role to play, her two fellow captives don’t fare well at all; reduced to little more than screaming, irrational clichés by the end. This is all before you arrive at the rather questionable decision to have all of the young captives spend a large chunk of the film as scantily clad as possible. It’s all more than a little awkward, even considering the film’s trashy premise, and adds to Split’s rather sour aftertaste.

Just as Split threatens to become derailed entirely however, along comes James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy to save the day. Further reinforcing his reputation as one of the finest actors of his generation, McAvoy throws himself headfirst into every one of his multiple characters; in a performance full to the brim with menace, penetrating gazes, and physical prowess. As he swings wildly from the scenery chewing fun of Hedwig to the brooding threat of Dennis, McAvoy puts in a performance of chameleon-like grace and menacing dominance that lifts the material far higher than it ought to and could be one of the actors finest turns to date.

But, while McAvoy will undoubtedly grab the film’s headlines, the true joy of Split is in the performance of the young Taylor-Joy. Her quietly intense performance emphatically pulls her character away from the realms of cliché and ensures that she’s able to go toe-to-toe with her more experienced co-star with ease. Coming off the back of her exceptional turn in The Witch, Anya Taylor-Joy’s mature portrayal of the tortured outsider Casey, belies her tender years and further reinforces her reputation as a talent to keep tabs on.

James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy’s performances are the defining factors in carrying Split through even its roughest patches. Despite M. Night Shyamalan’s most frustrating idiosyncrasies regularly showing their face, the two leads turn what could’ve been a car crash the size of The Happening, into something far more solid. Despite its awkward grip on mental illness and abuse, together with Shyamalan’s continued preoccupation with unnecessary twists, Split operates as perfectly serviceable thriller and keeps the director on the path to redemption. While he may never reach the peaks of The Sixth Sense again, Split is a clear return to basics and to the material he built his name on.