Movie Review Split

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2016 – spoiler alerts An extraordinary horror – science fiction movie dominated by James McAvoy’s cruelly Oscar ignored 24 different performances. He plays a man with multiple personalities, each struggling for control, and each as bad as the others until his final Beast persona manifests and makes the others seem sane. One of the personalities abducts three teenage girls who are held captive in a strange cell block, in preparation for sacrificing to the Beast. McAvoy visits them in his various personas, helping and hindering them, and they make various doomed attempts to escape, for which they are eventually punished by being separated. Kevin (McAvoy’s character’s main identity) also sees a psychiatrist, played by Betty Buckley. She tries to interview him in his various personas and develops a theory that with kills performable in one guise but not in another, her unorthodox theory being that the DID sufferer has a potential to become a new kind of entity entirely as we will see when the Beast takes over. After a very violent late act, one of the girls breaks free after finding the Beast is actually indestructible (he survives unscathed after being shot at point blank range). He too escapes, though the police and media are now onto him, setting up or his role in part three of the trilogy. The psychiatrist interludes are little more than expositional, and her rescue attempt on the girls proves useless. The film upset mental health experts looking into real Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) sufferers and implies that most if not all people with mental illness are serial killers in the making, a completely bogus indication. Interestingly, the main heroine is saved by her self-harming scars. The Beast identifies with her as a fellow sufferer and lets her go. She is doomed to be returned to the care of her abusive uncle. Extra spoilers – The film is a connecting film between two others, as revealed only in a final scene. A Kevin’s escape and nickname, The Beast is revealed on the TV news, diners in a café see it and someone remembers another similar killer with a strange nickname. The camera cuts to Bruce Willis, who points out that the man referred to is known as Glass. This is a reference to the first movie, Unbreakable, in which Willis, himself an indestructible superhero tangled with a villain called Glass played by Samuel L Jackson. A third movie, called Glass, draws all these stories together. Arthur Chappell