Split

 I wasn’t going to see Split until the “controversy” started. It’s not the huge backlash that accompanied Me Before You, but it was significant enough for me to investigate. I am morally against judging a piece of media before experiencing it. I read some user reviews on IMDB that gave Split one star. That wouldn’t have bothered me, as a lot of people on IMDB seem incapable of rating a movie anything other than a one-star or ten-star rating.  Take any blockbuster and the most positive user reviews on IMDB will make it seem like Casablanca. My problem with the reviews is that some of them were posted before the movie was released. And they didn’t see the movie at the film fest. These reviews gave it one star because of how it stigmatized mental illness and DID.

This is a valid complaint and there are avenues for people to voice that. The average user IMDB score is supposed to indicate the quality of the movie. This is what the Split score is at the time of this writing.

This is a breakdown of the votes.

1.9% of people gave Split one star. Given how many people just give anything they dislike one star, I would be surprised if even half of those one-star ratings were because of the stigmatization of DID.

Let’s be generous and assume that the one-star rating brigade brought the score down 0.1. Unless someone out there uses 7.7 as a threshold for “Good Movie”, I don’t see the point..

Me Before You isn’t an awful movie because of the euthanasia. It is an awful movie because of everything between the opening scene and the credits.

Split isn’t an awful movie because of the DID portrayal. It’s not even an awful movie.

Based on personal experience, people don’t like it when moral crusaders tell them that a piece of media is “problematic”. I’m not claiming that there is no connection between media and common opinion. But to say that a person will watch a movie and internalize the portrayals is ridiculous and condescending.

Anyway, if you have to complain about something in Split, how about the thing to which I will refer later?

This is all from memory, so some of it might be incorrect.

Also, there are spoilers below.

The Script                                                                                                                                      

I was really worried when the first lines of the movie told us Casey’s personality verbatim. Was this the lost “kidnapping episode” of The Undateables? But the script got better. Mostly.

The script is split divided into two intersecting plot-lines. One plot-line is Kevin (McAvoy’s main personality) keeping the girls hostage. This is the better part of the movie and I would have preferred the entire movie to take place in the ... place. (will reveal later) The girls go through the motions of trying to escape, but the writing is strong enough to be engaging.

Unfortunately, the other plot-line involves Betty Buckley playing Dr. Fletcher, the most harmful medical practitioner since Louise. She has sessions with Kevin  and advocates for awareness of this bizarre Hollywood version of DID. This is where I feel critics have a legitimate point. If you are going to exploit a mental disorder for horror, don’t pretend like there is any science behind it. My theory is that Shyamalan wanted Split to be more than beautifully-shot exploitative trash, so he threw in some Mad Libs about DID.

The DID exploration exploitation did not bother me as much as the thing to which I will refer later.

.

The Cinematography

For most of the movie, the cinematography is tight to give a claustrophobic feel. There is a technique where the camera becomes the first person view of a character. It took some time to get used to, but it is apparently a Shyamalan technique. Two shots are so unnecessarily artistic that they took me out of the movie. They are hilarious. The first one is the first time we meet Dr. Fletcher and there is a top-down shot of the staircase. The second one is when the Beast emerges and there is a top-down view as he runs past a street lamp.

The Acting

Google told me that the other two girls are Claire and Marcia. They exist so that Casey doesn’t have to talk to herself throughout the movie.  I don’t remember much about them.

Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) was really good despite… the reasons for her characterization. (A thing to which I will refer later)  

Awkwardly-placed flashbacks flesh out the thing about Casey to which I will refer later.

MacAvoy is, of course, outstanding.

The Gore

The gore was hilarious. You only see it for a few seconds, but it looked like they painted a honeycomb red and put it on the girls’ corpses.

OCD

All these people complaining that Split portrays DID in a harmful way ignore the portrayal of OCD. Dennis (one of the main personalities) has Hollywood OCD. This ends up being really central to the story, because he can’t stand clothes with dirt on them and Shyamalan needed an excuse to have teenage girls in their underwear for half the movie. Remember when I said this movie is exploitative trash?

The Beast

The main threat throughout the movie, besides the guy holding three teenage girls hostage in increasing stages of undress, is The Beast, a mysterious 24^th personality. Kevin keeps saying that he is waiting for The Beast to emerge to perform some ritual on the girls. Dr. Fletcher tells Kevin that The Beast doesn’t exist because he isn’t in “the room” and Emma Watson doesn’t play one of the kidnapped girls.

“The room” is a metaphorical place in Kevin’s brain where all his personalities sit on chairs in a circle and only one of them can “take the light” at one time. Remember when I said that this movie doesn’t even try to portray DID accurately?

I was worried that The Beast would be a CGI monstrosity, but it wasn’t. It was just McAvoy with prominent veins. The movie went further than I thought it would when The Beast cannibalized the two other girls.

The Knife and The Window

The two funniest scenes were the knife scene and the window scene. Especially the window scene.

The Thing

Throughout the movie, there are hints about a thing. There are flashbacks to a hunting trip with Casey as a child, her father, and her uncle. At first, I thought it was a clunky way to establish Casey’s survivalist skills. As the movie went on, I suspected the other purpose but was hoping it wouldn’t happen. It did.

Dennis forces the girls to take off their clothes because of his Hollywood OCD.  The other girls get to their underwear quickly, but Casey has more layers. At the climax, she removes enough clothes to reveal self-harm scars. It turns out that the hunting trip culminated in her uncle sexually abusing Casey. The Beast says something about how he thinks that the abused are more pure and he only eats impure people. I think that this sounded profound in Shyamalan’s head but he wrote it in the same place he wrote the script for Lady in the Water.

I don’t want to say that this is “offensive”, “problematic”, or any other word that isn’t an argument. But I felt that it was inconsistent with the tone of the movie.

Concluson

Split is a lot of fun. I refuse to be offended by movies with lines such as this:

THE BEAST: Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved! Rejoice!