McAvoy Mesmerizes In Many, Many Roles

M. Night Shyamalan’s career as a writer and director seems to be following an inverted bell curve. He started on a high note with 1999’s acclaimed “The Sixth Sense” — you know, the one where Haley Joel Osment saw dead people. He followed that hit with Bruce Willis as a real-world superhero in 2000’s “Unbreakable,” then focused on Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix as they dealt with aliens in 2002’s “Signs.”

But Shyamalan’s twist-filled formula started to grow stale. “The Village,” “Lady in the Water” and “The Happening” were largely forgettable, and he hit rock bottom with two failed attempts at big-budget blockbusters: 2010’s muddled “The Last Airbender,” which was based on an animated series, and 2013’s “After Earth,” a surprisingly boring sci-fi film featuring Will Smith and his son, Jaden.

Once you hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up. Following 2015’s “The Visit,” a found-footage horror film that was a success at the box office, Shyamalan’s latest thriller, “Split,” gets a lot right — although it’s certainly not perfect.

There is one glowing reason to see “Split” in theaters, and that is James McAvoy. He plays Kevin, a man with more than 20 different personalities (most are good, but some are bad) who kidnaps three teenage girls, and watching him switch between these characters is mesmerizing. One minute he’s Dennis, an intimidating man with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the next he’s Hedwig, a 9-year-old child who loves Kanye West. McAvoy is able to transform with the slightest switch in his facial expressions and mannerisms, making it seem as though these girls are being held captive by a horde rather than one man. Imagine McAvoy as Jekyll and Hyde, but there are many Jekylls battling a handful of Hydes.

The film dives into the kidnapping immediately. Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) don’t add much to the plot, but we learn more about Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is an outsider at her school, through flashbacks to her childhood. Taylor-Joy is impressive and powerful in the role; she is able to believably balance the terror of the situation with her ingenious attempts to survive.

The most interesting aspect if the film is its assertion — through the lectures of Kevin’s psychiatrist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley) — that the personalities associated with dissociative identity disorder can each have different physiological traits. One personality has diabetes, while the others do not. “Split” explores the possibility that these personalities can become something more than human.

Despite McAvoy’s amazing performance and the clever ideas surrounding his personalities, in the end it’s got the same pitfalls as any thriller. Claire and Marcia are basically there to end up in their underwear. Fletcher probably could have called the cops on multiple occasions. A plot point involving the sexual abuse of a child, which felt out of place, is more disturbing than most of Kevin’s personalities.

But in the end, “Split” is still a move in the right direction for Shyamalan. McAvoy alone is worth the price of admission.

“Split” is rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic content and behavior, violence and some language. It is playing widely.