Lacklustre thriller a ponderous homage

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This article was published 19/01/2017 (2652 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Director M. Night Shyamalan may have announced his readiness to do a comic book movie as far back as the year 2000, when he followed up his blockbuster The Sixth Sense with his take on the superhero mythos, Unbreakable.

Whatever the strengths of that movie — and it definitely has its merits — Marvel and DC apparently didn’t come calling on Shymalan, probably because he is not inclined to follow the accepted template of the superhero origin story, in which the super-guy’s powers are established by the end of the first act and the rest of the movie is devoted to kicking ass.

Shyamalan likes to stretch things out to an almost torturous degree — a quality very evident in Split, which you might describe as his ponderous homage to Psycho, except his psychologically fractured antagonist has 23 personalities.

Kevin (James McAvoy in a bravura performance) is also known as Dennis, Patricia, Hedwig, Orwell and many others. In the movie’s opening, the tough, streetwise Dennis enters a car in a mall parking lot and kidnaps three young women. This is an unprecedented nightmare for the well-adjusted Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula). But we sense their emotionally troubled classmate, problem student Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), has faced this kind of outrage before. 

When Dennis gets these three young women alone in his labyrinthine underground lair, the snail’s-paced battle is on as Claire and Marcia try to figure out a way to overpower their captor while Casey resorts to mind games, attempting to exploit the weakest link of Kevin’s “horde” of personalities, specifically the nine-year-old boy Hedwig.

Concurrent with all this action, Shyamalan leaves the expository heavy lifting to Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), the psychiatrist who has mapped all of Kevin’s personalities. She gets emails from various concerned personalities and fears the promised rise of a 24th identity, whom the others refer to as “The Beast.”

In sessions, Fletcher gingerly negotiates her patient’s penchant for lying to accommodate her controversial theory that people who suffer from dissociative identity disorder may hold the key to an evolutionary leap with their ability to alter their physiologies to accommodate different personalities.

That would actually be a rich premise for a decent science-fiction movie. Unfortunately, Shyamalan is very much stuck in the mode of lurid horror, complete with wince-inducing flashbacks explaining Casey’s damaged psyche. With three terrified heroines in various stages of undress, the movie’s thematic ambitions are consistently undercut by the Slumber Party Massacre trappings.

To give credit where it’s due: McAvoy sells it. The actor invests each of his characters’ personalities with dramatic shadings of mannerism.

This might have elevated Kevin to the stature of Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates, if Shyamalan’s script had been as good as McAvoy’s acting.

It is not.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca 

Twitter: @FreepKing