James McAvoy plays a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder in M. Night Shyamalan’s SPLIT
SPLIT (M. Night Shyamalan, 2016)
Opens Friday, January 20
www.splitmovie.com
M. Night Shyamalan’s latest bit of cinematic trickery and deception, Split, can be split itself, right down the middle. The first half of the film is a tense, intriguing psychological thriller. However, the second half devolves into a jaw-droppingly inane horror debacle. For much of the film, James McAvoy is mesmerizing as Kevin, a man with twenty-three personalities who has kidnapped three teenage girls: good friends Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) and their strange classmate, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy). Various personalities take over, in clothing, age, speech, and mannerisms, as Kevin watches over the girls and visits his therapist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), an expert in dissociative identity disorder and trauma victims who believes that the many personalities inside people with DID, like Kevin, can be different physically and psychologically; DID sufferers may have the ability to use the brain in ways that the rest of the population can’t, unlocking undreamed-of human potential. Meanwhile, the mysterious Casey has flashbacks of when she was five years old (played by Izzie Coffey) and her father (Sebastian Arcelus) taught her lessons in survival while her uncle (Brad William Henke) taught her other things when his brother wasn’t looking.
Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula) await what terror comes next in half-baked psychological thriller
In the first hour, writer-director Shyamalan explores some fascinating scientific issues and treats the female victims, particularly the sensitive, odd Casey, with at least a modicum of respect. But as the plot holes start piling up, the story turns into a cliché-ridden jumble with soft-core exploitation shots of teenage bodies and references to such superior films as Saw, The Shining, Room, 28 Days Later, and, primarily, the more controversial parts of The Silence of the Lambs; mental health providers and those suffering from mental illness are not going to be too happy with Split,, just as the LGBTQ community was angry with Jonathan Demme back in 1991. Even McAvoy (Atonement, The Last King of Scotland) loses his edginess at the absurd climax, followed by a surprise self-referential finale that is downright embarrassing; if Shyamalan, who makes a cameo in the film, really wanted to use that last scene, it should have come during or after the credits. Throughout his career, Shyamalan has proved himself a master of ideas, from The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable to The Village, Wayward Pines, and The Visit, but all too often he is unable to bring it all together, leaving only scornful disappointment in his wake, and theaters full of audiences wondering what could have been.
In his debut feature, twenty-five-year-old writer-director Emiliano Rocha Minter paints a horrifying vision of modern-day Mexico in We Are the Flesh. The film, a hit at festivals around the world, takes place in a kind of surreal, postapocalyptic underground hellmouth ruled by lunatic ogre Mariano (Noé Hernandez), who is delighted when siblings Lucio (Diego Gamaliel) and Fauna (María Evoli) come stumbling into his lair. As the three of them build a bizarre womblike structure, they engage in taboo acts that can best be described as foul, vile, disgusting, putrid, and demented — as well as strangely beautiful and maddeningly erotic — luridly photographed by Yollótl Alvarado on eerie sets designed by Manuela García. Esteban Aldrete’s threateningly pulsating score is interrupted by moans, screams, and occasional songs, several of which transform into oddly beguiling music videos. Minter also edited the film, with Yibran Assuad, maintaining a steady, sinister pace in which the audience awaits the next bit of craziness with both gleeful revulsion and terrifying excitement. Dialogue is limited and eccentric but gets the point across: “You were chosen by chance,” Mariano says, “and remember that chance is the most dangerous criminal who has roamed the earth.”
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The Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Perception” continues January 20 with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 mind-altering, fetishistic psychological thriller, Vertigo. Based on Boileau-Narcejac’s 1954 novel, D’entre les morts, the film delves deep into the nature of fear and obsession. Jimmy Stewart stars as John “Scottie” Ferguson, a police detective who retires after his acrophobia leads to the death of a fellow cop. An old college classmate, wealthy businessman Gavin Elster (Tom Holmore), asks Scottie to look into his wife’s odd behavior; Elster believes that Madeleine (Kim Novak) is being inhabited by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, her great-grandmother, a woman who committed suicide in her mid-twenties, the same age that Madeleine is now. Scottie follows Madeleine as she goes to Carlotta’s grave, visits a portrait of her in a local museum, and jumps into San Francisco Bay. Scottie rescues her, brings her to his house, and starts falling in love with her. But on a visit to Mission San Juan Bautista, tragedy strikes when Scottie can’t get to the top of the tower because of his vertigo. After a stint in a sanatorium, he wanders the streets of San Francisco where he and Madeleine had fallen in love, as if hoping to see a ghost — and when he indeed finds a woman who reminds him of Madeleine, a young woman named Judy Barton (Novak), he can’t help but try to turn her into his lost love, with tragedy waiting in the wings once again.
