Split is a 2017 horror/thriller about three girls who, after being kidnapped by a man with 23 distinct personalities, struggle to escape before the 24th arrives.
WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Dour wallflower Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) is your basic troubled teen with a dark past who doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the girls in her high school. Still, out of pity, she gets invited to Claire’s (Haley Lu Richardson) birthday party, and when it’s over, Claire and her friend Marcia (Jessica Sula) offer her a ride home from the restaurant, Claire’s father happy to oblige. Out in the parking lot, the girls happily pile into the car while Claire’s poor dad meets a foul end as a kidnapper (James McAvoy) gets the best of him and makes off with the young women, taking them to an unknown location underground. He’s an unwell man, suffering from dissociative identity disorder, appearing to them in a variety of disturbing personalities, eventually revealing twenty-three distinct characters, many of them prophesying of a soon-to-come twenty-fourth, one they call ‘the beast.’ Yikes. To escape, Casey must learn to earn the trust of one of the twenty-three, playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse before the real monster arrives.
QUICKE REVIEW: While writer/director M. Night Shyamalan spent a decade spiraling, many wondering if he would ever be able to find his groove again, though of late, he’s certainly begun to show some promise. Split might be his most accomplished work to date, a supremely-well written and directed film led by a career-defining turn from McAvoy who easily carries the film with a jarring performance. A direct sequel to Shyamalan’s 2000 Unbreakable, this is a terrific little thriller that’s tight, claustrophobic and above all, highly compelling. Read our full review here.
THAT WRONG CAR MOMENT: There are many really strong moments in Split, the film loaded with some surprisingly effective twists that turn up the tension, yet it’s the story’s raw opening salvo that has the most impact, even with Shyamalan’s great work afterward. This is a filmmaker in absolute command of his story, funneling us down a highly purposeful path to a shocking cut to black. It’s so masterfully done, it might be easy to overlook how well it’s actually constructed.
As Claire, her father, and Marcia playfully and warmly goad Casey to join them for a ride, Shyamalan is already toying with the premise, keeping Casey’s face often only half visible with Claire’s father blocking our view. This leaves her often sort of frustratingly out of the picture, suggesting a sense of invisibility she already feels among these friends and a kind of metaphorical image of the half of her we don’t know yet, something that will prove crucial to the plot later on. It’s clever and dark, keeping the audience a little off kilter right from the start.
Then it cuts to the walk to the car, with the camera trailing the group, the lens actually the point of view of the kidnapper, something we don’t even ‘get’ until it’s already too late as Claire’s dad looks up and notices ‘us’ standing there. That’s just chilling. Then we cut to Casey in the front seat, the two girls in the back giggling and oblivious as the camera pans around to show the back window and a hint at some movement, followed by a thump, one that draws Casey’s eyes to the rearview mirror and shot of the back end of the car. She sees nothing, and again, Shyamalan tweaks expectations, fooling us into thinking we’ll get a look at something surely out of whack, but he refuses to go there, instead, panning the camera one more time to the back as it follows a figure we think is Claire’s father move to the front driver side, then swinging back to catch Casey get a second look out the mirror. This time, we get the payoff as she sees a spilled pile of doggie bags scattered on the pavement. Here comes trouble.
Casey slowly turns to the driver, who once more is looking through ‘our’ eyes, the camera fixed on her frightened face, she realizing something very bad is about to happen. At last, we cut to the kidnapper, a clean cut McAvoy in a shaved head who dons a painter’s mask and sprays the girl’s in the backseat with a sleeping toxin and then calmly faces front, removing his mask. He appears to believe Casey will make no move to escape, the girl frozen in fear. She gingerly places a few fingers on the door handle though and the released latch signals the dashboard a door is ajar, alerting the kidnapper he was wrong to think she wouldn’t move. They face each other, he in hollow horror and she, face streaked in tears. He then puts on the mask, reaches for the spray and lunges at the camera, the point of view now from Casey. It all goes black.
WHY IT’S GREAT: With no music to prime us, no tropes to rely on, Shyamalan instead builds incredible tension from movement and subverted expectation. I’ve written before about the importance of how well the monster in a movie must be introduced, though admittedly referring then to actual giant creatures, such as King Kong or Godzilla, yet the villain’s entrance in a thriller is equally critical. Here, Shyamalan understands that his monster must have impact but not let slip a single coming secret in this opening moment, keeping him dead silent and dressed in neutral greys. He is but a blank canvas, his actions precise, limited, and entirely with specific intent. He is cold, meticulous, and lethal. While we soon learn much more about the troubled kidnapper, we understand everything we need to know about him with barely a minute on screen. That’s great direction.
Casey too reveals much, frozen and clearly shaken by the sudden and jarring violence, and while we don’t know quite why right then, it teases to a burden she carries, once learned by the audience giving this moment even more severity. There’s a full fifteen seconds after Casey has unlatched the door before the kidnapper sprays her, a gap filled with only the two looking at each other and the soft chime of the door ajar bell dinging the seconds like a countdown to doom (itself a sensational thematic device) and it’s tempting to ask, “Why doesn’t she run?”
Clip Courtesy Fandango
While it might be splitting hairs, the real question is “Why does she stay?” And that right there is the hook that many might miss at the start but becomes more clear at the end when we fully understand her past. This is all she knows, sometimes the ferocity of an immediate attack less severe than one made on the chase. She takes her chances, and those tears are so telling in both the pain of facing an unknown fate and a biting sense of familiarity.
Either way, I love how neither she nor the kidnapper say a word to each other throughout this scene, the conflict one of only expressions, making this first meeting one of absolutes with one overpowering the other. There are outbursts, not flailing arms and high-pitched screams. It is a silent submission. This is essential in setting up the swings in balance that soon shift to the other side as the story unfolds, the grayish opacity in the car’s opening moment itself becoming a collage of colors in the end that redefine the two of them. Split is a terrific return to form for Shyamalan and reason again to celebrate this once highly-praised filmmaker. The film’s opening twist is a great example of smart visual storytelling that challenges its audience while offering up plenty to keep sleeping with the lights on. This is a great movie moment.