Movie Review—Split

Split

by Peter J. O’Connell

Split. Released: Jan. 2017. Runtime: 117 mins. MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic content and behavior, violence and some language.

The abduction and imprisonment of a young woman (or women) by a disturbed individual has been a plot situation of horror and thriller films off and on since The Collector in 1965. Recent examples include Room (2015) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). Now writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has given us Split, a film about young women abducted and imprisoned by 23 individuals—well, not exactly “individuals,” let’s say “personalities” or “alters.”

You see, teenagers Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Marcia (Jessica Sula) and Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) have been seized and held in a labyrinthine underground complex by “Dennis,” one of 23 personalities inhabiting the body of Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a victim of childhood abuse with severe dissociative identity disorder (a/k/a “split personality” or “multiple personality disorder”).

Psychiatrist Dr. Karen Fletcher (Broadway veteran Betty Buckley), over the years that she has been treating Kevin, has found him to be generally stable, with the personalities controlled by one of them known as “Barry,” a sketch artist with a Boston accent. And Kevin has cooperated with Dr. Fletcher as she researches her belief that psychological imbalance can cause physiological changes.

But now it seems that Dennis, who has obsessive/compulsive disorder and violent tendencies, is beginning to supplant Barry as Kevin’s dominating alter. There is also “Patricia,” who dresses as a woman and speaks with a British accent. Patricia hints to the three girls that they will serve a “greater purpose.”

And “Hedwig,” who has a female name but claims to be a nine-year-old boy, confides to them that they may be sacrificed to “The Beast,” a possibly emerging 24th personality of great strength and ferocity. Hedwig also performs a manic dance, the most hilarious/creepy terpsichorean endeavor since that done by Ralph Fiennes’ character in A Bigger Splash (2015).  

As suspense intensifies, the three girls, particularly Casey, a victim of child abuse herself, make various attempts at escape before The Beast is unleashed. Anya Taylor-Joy, so good in The Witch (2015), is also good here, but everything in the film pales in comparison to the astonishing performance of James McAvoy. His absolute mastery of gesture, movement and voice empowers him to create the various personalities convincingly—and instantly, shift between them seamlessly, have them converse with each other, and, at times, even have them pretend to be one another.

Shyamalan, auteur of The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000) and The Visit (2015), is known as the master of the “twist” ending. Let’s just say that, gripping as Split is, the twist at its end is not as tightly tied as in those previous films.

“Footnotes” to the film: (1) Split has been praised by many film critics, but it has been castigated by various organizations dealing with the mentally ill for associating mental illness with violent behavior. And the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation has issued a statement saying that the film was made “at the expense of a vulnerable population that struggles to be recognized and receive the effective treatment that they deserve.” (2) Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a controversial subject in the medical and counseling community. Many claim that it is not really a disorder in its own right. (3) The first case of DID is thought to have been described by Paracelsus in 1646. Fewer than 200 cases of DID were diagnosed by 1970, but a peak of 40,000 such diagnoses was reached by 2000. Since then, the number of diagnoses being made has declined. (4) Whatever the attitude toward DID in the medical and counseling community, it has been portrayed with remarkable frequency in books, films and television shows—ranging from the “doubling” stories of Poe, Dostoyevsky and Stevenson in the 19^th century through the purportedly true accounts in the book and film The Three Faces of Eve in the 1950s and the book and miniseries Sybil in the