I always spoil the twist of a new Shyamalan movie for myself before I see it. I have a certain affinity to be fascinated by twists, that could lead me to judge a movie higher than I actually might have. The Sixth Sense (not that it was ever bad) was the film that showed me this, and I won’t make the mistake again. The Visit (Shyamalan’s last effort) barring its twist was a rancid, annoying film, and I caught that. I went into Split knowing full well what would happen, ready to feel the superiority of my mastery over the games the movie was playing….and walked out joyous at the fact that even without said twist, Split is kind of fascinating, earnest and beautifully intense. The reviews of The Visit called it too early, but now M. Night Shyamalan has returned to his previous success. Welcome back. Split focusses on Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) who is kidnapped along with two other girls and is kept in captivity by Kevin (James Mcavoy). Kevin has Dissociative identity disorder, which means he has multiple personalities going on in his body, each of which can randomly take the spotlight. So what we have is a thriller where the captor can’t control whether or not he’s a nine-year-old child named Hedwig, or a pedophile named Dennis, or the twenty-three personalities that embody his body. Hands down that is a really interesting idea for a movie, good job on that Shyamalan. Ok, and now that you’ve read that I’d like to say that I’m about to spoil this movie. The reason? Split is a film that is a good movie on its own, but a great movie when you consider its implications and the genre that it actually resides in. See, Split might have been marketed as a horror movie, and it is a pretty solid thriller, but when you get down to it, but it’s actually a superhero film told from the perspective of victims who are often ignored by the stories themselves. Kevin, has in fact, supernatural powers which can manifest themselves as one of his identities. These powers allow him to climb up walls, be incredibly strong, fast and for his skin to be especially rough and unstoppable. Where does this all lead? Well, Split is a sort of sequel to M. Night Shyamalan’s best film (and a contender for one of my very favorite superhero films) Unbreakable. Split is an origin story for a villain in that universe. The film might seem overly earnest and hammly written which is a problem for Shyamalan...when he’s making movies that expressly exist in the real world. In the context of a superhero film and the accepted aesthetics, you can get away with a lot more of this stuff. Take Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 1 and 2 for instance. Those films of course, were silly, but they were allowed to be because the silliness allowed for these larger than life characters to blend ever more into the background of the modern day context that they existed in. This allowance of more silly concepts allows Shyamalan’s usually hard to take dialogue to become believable, almost as if has just been torn from the comic books that one used to read as a child. Shyamalan does the concept of the superhero connected universe one better and finally pulls off the “darkness,” that Zack Snyder and his cohorts have been trying to fake in the DC Extended Universe, and he’s making it look easy. The two villains that have populated the “Pittsburg Extended Universe” (let’s call it that) are both villains, but they aren’t maniacal psychopaths like Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman nor are they overly powerful leaders with many henchmen that simply want to destroy the world, as in every Marvel movie. Shyamalan’s villains are people full of pain and suffering, just like most of the real villains of the world. Not to empathize, just simply to dimensionalize. Of all the “Universes” I’d take Kevin (a villain named The Horde) and Mr. Glass (still a high point for Samuel L. Jackson) over the incarnations of more popular villains that are present in the alternate universes. James Mcavoy putting in way more work than he necessarily needed to into each personality as well as being just scary when The Horde finally emerges puts Split above that pack too. For as much of the dialogue is taken care of by the present genre, some of it probably wouldn’t have sold this well if it weren’t for Mcavoy putting everything he has into the performance. This was the same with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson almost 17 years ago. The actresses on display here, Anya Taylor-Joy (so great in the best horror film of last year The Witch) and Haley Lu Richardson of The Edge of Seventeen make the best of some of their more oddly phrased lines. Taylor-Joy’s character has a flashback arch going on here that gets downright fascinating once the effect of it is truly shown, and she proves her versatility shown in The Witch was no fluke. She shines in this. Split might not come to be a favorite film of the year, but as the first great genre/superhero movie of the year, this is a show that can’t be denied that title. The writing is back to the quality it contained in Unbreakable, the direction is back to that point, and so seems Shyamalan. Here’s to Unbreakable 2? Please? I give Split a 9 out of 10. Review by Stephen Tronicek
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |