Rotten Bananas: Split

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January 24th, 2017

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Nicklaus Bartelli

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Score: 90 / 105

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         I hope you enjoy staff member Charly Crane’s 2016 year in movies review. While I wasn’t drooling as much over Star Wars: Rogue One, I found M. Night Shyamalan’s Split to be a quick chart-topper for thriller of the year for 2017. Shyamalan brought us the excitement of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable in 1999 and 2000, and most recently resurrected his directing with the sleeper hit The Visit in 2015 after crawling in a hole after The Last Airbender (2010). The bar was high for Shyamalan to deliver with Split, and with the help of what I would call an Oscar-worthy performance by James McAvoy, the film delivered with a continuous rising scale of suspense and stomach-locking grit.

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               Unlike your typical horror/thriller, Split didn’t waste time with the happy status quo at the beginning before diving into the thick of it, and I couldn’t have agreed more. The more screen time given to James McAvoy to enlighten people about his dissociative identity disorder (DID), which included at least 23 different personalities, 7 of which we saw on screen, was certainly the path to take. If McAvoy doesn’t at least get nominated next year for executing 7 characters in less than 2 hours, I think we can finally call the Academy a crock. I don’t think McAvoy carried the film himself, however. The cinematography with the above-the-streetlight and sideways awaken-from-sleep shots ran synonymous with the creepy score and dark and reality-disconnected mood.

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               Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) gives a desirable B-List acting performance as Casey Cooke, who’s past we learn about in snippets, left wondering how it will connect to the Shyamalan twist at the end. Of course, we get to see the director in a sideline role, per usual M. Night, this time as a reserved computer whiz, bringing back the nostalgia of his older films. The quick glimpses of brutal and grotesque shots are really what make this film, similar to the pants-wetting brief sights of aliens we saw in Signs. Never knowing when that half-second gory shot will appear on-screen forcing the audience to watch where they might normally turn and cover their kids’ eyes is exactly why Shyamalan is so cutting.

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               Although I’m a believer in dissociative identity disorder and people having the ability to manifest multiple personalities, I am never a fan when a good screenplay gets washed over by social commentary. I felt like the film tried a little too hard to push the realness and awareness for multiple personality disorder. It did however need to spend some time educating viewers on the full effects and extreme capabilities DID can have. Besides the social commentary, Split kept my heart rate up for a solid thirty minutes at the end and left me wondering about my own unknown physical capabilities. It also left everyone up in the air about a potential sequel of not only this film, but one of Shyamalan’s past hits. I gave it a 90 out of 105, as we stick to allowing five points extra credit in this paper. Split delivered all the feels I wanted in a thriller, from dark and tense to humorous and provoked.