I knew I was going to have OpinionsTM about Split all the way back in 2016 when I first saw the trailer. A movie featuring mental illness that portrays it in a controversial and not exactly accurate way? Oh yes, I was almost definitely going to have something to say about that. But then I noticed the growing controversy over the film's portrayal of mental illness and its alleged transphobia, I started to worry a little. Just how bad was this movie going to be?
Three teenage girls - Claire, Marcia and Casey - are heading home after attending Claire's birthday party when they are abducted and imprisoned in an underground lair by a man called Dennis. At first it seems that they are there purely for Dennis' own gratification, but it soon turns out that the truth is far stranger and more sinister. Dennis is actually one of 23 personalities existing in the mind of Kevin, a man suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) stemming from his abusive childhood. Dennis and another personality, Patricia, believe in a 24th personality that they refer to as "The Beast", and they believe that he is about to emerge - the girls are to be sacrifices to him when he does. Eventually it falls to Casey, scarred by her own childhood abuse, to try to outwit Dennis, Patricia and the other hostile personalities and survive before they all become food for The Beast.
So let's get this hot spicy controversy out of the way first: DID - sometimes still known as Multiple Personality Disorder although that term is frowned upon now - is a very rare (1-3% of the population is said to suffer from it) mental disorder, still considered controversial in some psychiatric circles and doesn't really work in the way that this movie (and Hollywood in general) portray it. Allegedly Split is based on the real-life case of Billy Milligan, and certainly some of the details of his case have made it into the movie (specifically the way in which Kevin's "personalities" decide who is allowed to "take control" of Kevin's body), but it needs to be remembered that one person's mental illness is not everyone's mental illness. Certainly the vast majority of DID sufferers - and sufferers of mental illness in general - are not criminals and pose no danger to the public, and this is where the film falls into the Hollywood trap of "mental illness = bad person" by focusing on outlier cases and "what ifs" from the more reactionary tabloids. Another huge fallacy that Split perpetuates is that people with DID can change their body chemistry between personalities, which just isn't biologically possible no matter how much some people might want to believe otherwise (there have been cases of people with DID being deaf in one personality and hearing in all others, or paralysed in one and able to walk in another, but those are psychosomatic cases rather than biological). This even leads to the film implying that people with DID/mental illness in fact have superpowers, which I only wish was the case as it would make my day-to-day life a lot easier. So Split certainly has a confusing message in regard to its portrayal of the mentally ill, and I can understand why some people are angry at it because they feel it unfairly demonises them (I don't think it's deliberate, however, any more than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde does). I will say though, that the movie is not transphobic - two of Kevin's personalities happen to be female, and they dress appropriately when they are in control. That's all there is to it. It would only be transphobic if one of the other personalities reacted negatively to this, and none of them do.
Split is a film from M. Night Shyamalan, who is known of course for his films involving twist or shock revelations, usually at the end of the film. His films have ranged from the excellent (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable) to the absolutely hated (The Happening, The Last Airbender). Split, I feel, falls somewhere in the upper half of quality for Shyamalan's films; it has its flaws (see above for some of the most egregious), but it's still engaging and interesting. And while I won't confirm whether or not there's a twist at the end, I will say that there's a coda connecting Split to one of Shyamalan's previous films, which was both a nice touch and opening up the possibility for a sequel.
Split is more psychological horror than anything else, dodgy theories in biological psychology aside. It also conforms to several of the traditional horror movie tropes - the sinister abductor; the threat of the Monster (literally called The Beast); and the Final Girl. There's also fairy tale references as well, although I won't mention which one(s) as it would reveal a major part of the film's climax. Finally there's a strong undercurrent of feminism in the film, focused on Casey's character, which was great up until a weak and ambiguous (primary) ending.
James McAvoy deserves a whole heap of praise for his role in this film, playing no less than eight different roles over the course of the film (although with his head still shaved from X-Men: Apocalypse and some of the subject matter from the film, my mind kept trying to tell me Professor Xavier jokes). Anya Taylor-Joy, who we last saw in The VVitch as Thomasin, is also excellent as the haunted yet determined to survive Casey. Really though, all of the actors were good, although as with most Shyamalan films the bulk of the movie is carried by just one or two people. In the end, I would recommend Split, even (or perhaps especially) to those who are angry at its themes, because condemning something without even seeing it is never good (unless it's the movie Titanic, because a three-hour disaster film where the boat doesn't sink till the final hour is a disgrace). I the end, it's still a fictional film, set in a fictional (fantastical) world. It's not claiming to be objectively true about anything, just to entertain.
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