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Split on “Split”

“Split” is the twelfth movie directed by M. Night Shyamalan since his debut in 1992. (Courtesy of Universal Pictures)

Owen Johnson
Connector Staff

In terms of what kind of movie it is, “Split” is one of a kind. There are a lot of times when a movie turns out unintentionally hilarious, but this is one of the first instances where a movie that seems to be aiming for “unintentional” hilarity ends up being kind of good. Looks like M. Night Shyamalan cannot even do a bad movie right.

Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a man with twenty-three different personalities, ends up kidnapping three girls in preparation for the surfacing of his twenty-fourth personality.

Almost everything about this movie is screaming that it was intended as an “unintentionally” awful and hilarious movie that ended up accidentally being good. The execution of the trailer made it look silly, and some of the lines McAvoy says are unfittingly amusing to be in a serious horror movie, and the entire premise just sounds laughable. Somehow, in an odd way, it all works.

Most of this should be credited to James McAvoy’s performance. A lesser actor would not have been able to pull off some of the dialogue (especially when trying to pull off the young child identity), but McAvoy ends up making the at times amusing dialogue fit for whichever personality he is performing.

There are essentially two separate stories going on in “Split.” The first story is based around Kevin and the three teenage girls he’s kidnapped, and the second focuses on Kevin and his psychiatrist, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley). The story with Kevin and the girls is the lesser of the two, mostly because the three girls never act like they are scared and only one of the actresses (Haley Lu Richardson) seems to be trying to give a convincing performance.

The story revolving around Kevin and Dr. Fletcher is much better, as both actors do a good job playing their characters, it subtly sets up some details that will reappear later, and it doles out information in a creative and interesting way that does not feel like an exposition drop. Had the entire movie been based more around Kevin and Dr. Fletcher, as opposed to having to share the screen with the plot involving the three girls, the movie would have been a lot better.

The story with the girls is mostly weighed down by the poor performances of the three young actresses, but another source of problems with it are the constant flashbacks that the main girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) has. The flashbacks give backstory and into her character and how she knows how to do certain things, but most of them seem unneeded in the grand scheme of what is happening.

On a technical level, the movie is very good. There is good utilization of lighting and sound editing. The only technical aspect that has problems with it is the cinematography, and in that case it is a fluctuation of quality. There are a lot of good and competent shots in the movie, while others feel like try hard attempts at having visually interesting shots, while other times it all feels off.

“Split” is a very hard movie to judge. On one hand, the movie is technically good, but on the other hand it seems to have been aiming for a bad and “unintentionally” hilarious outcome, and it failed at that.

Final Grade: C+

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