There are very few career-downfalls in cinematic history in terms of radical change of quality as notable as that of M. Night Shyamalan. The wunderkind genius behind The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable had such a promising career and then decided to squander all his potential by making a steady stream of films that ranged from painfully mediocre (Signs) to outright awful and offensively bad (The Last Airbender). However, there is a certain palpable joy when someone who has become toxic in terms of critical and commercial reception returns in a blaze of glory, and Shyamalan managed to make a triumphant return with The Visit in 2015, and while it was not nearly flawless enough to redeem himself completely, it did set him on the right path, which resulted in Split, another great horror film from the director who is definitive of his misfires than his successes. Like The Visit, Split is not an entirely-satisfying return to Shymalan’s notable early years, but it does represent the director as being far more mature and able to construct a coherent and logical, albeit often flawed, horror film that is thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.

Split is centered around three girls, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) who are unwittingly kidnapped by a mysterious man (James McAvoy) and held hostage in a squalid basement. They soon discover their captor has multiple personalities, including an emotionless, OCD-inflicted perfectionist named Dennis, a slightly-sinister British woman named Patricia and a mischevious nine-year-old boy named Hedwig. As the film progresses, we discover that this man (whose real name is Kevin Wendell Crumb) suffers from Disassociative Identity Disorder and has twenty-three distinct personalities, each one being able to have “the light” (referring to the control of Kevin’s body), and he regularly sees a psychologist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who studies individuals afflicted with this disorder, and sees them as remarkable and extraordinary, rather than being mentally-ill individuals with split personalities, and she is able to understand the potential that lurks within each one of them. The victims are horrified to learn that they have been captured to serve as nourishment for an ominous figure known as “The Beast”, who Dr. Fletcher surmises is a possible twenty-fourth identity, and by far the most malicious, as it is a persona capable of actual gruesome violence.  The girls need to find a way to outsmart Kevin and his personalities and ensure their safe escape – but of course, that is far easier said than done.

First of all, we should address the aspect on which this entire film is based, the central performance. James McAvoy is undoubtedly a good actor, and he has shown great potential in many previous performances, where he has been solid and reliable, and as charismatic as one could possibly hope. However, Split offered McAvoy the opportunity to have the most fascinating character of his career, a demented and disturbed man with over two-dozen conceivable personalities. This is the kind of performance daring actors would absolutely adore, as it allows one to play a diverse group of characters, and when they are as gloriously fun as Kevin’s various personalities, it can be so entertaining to watch, and can only be challenging but ultimately very rewarding for the actor himself. I found McAvoy to be extraordinary, and the way in which he deftly switched between personalities was masterful, and after a while, even the viewer starts to be able to separate each personality from the other, and we sometimes forget that McAvoy is playing all these characters. This is a testament to his dedication, as well as his undeniable talent, which allowed him to play such an extraordinary character, and being unsettlingly great while doing it.

While much of Split is focused on McAvoy’s terrific performance (and rightly so), we cannot neglect to mention Betty Buckley, who is really wonderful as Dr. Karen Fletcher, the caring psychologist who treats Kevin and his personalities. It would be easy to dismiss Buckley as being nothing more than a solid supporting character that exists to just propel the story forward – but that would ignore the fantastic contribution she makes to the film, lending it credibility and emotional gravitas to a character that could have been poorly-developed, but actually served to be far more essential to the film than one would expect. The biggest surprise about Split (what we can consider the trademark Shyamalan “twist”) is that Buckley is actually developed really well from a character I expected to be one-dimensional and just a plot device. There are moments where she actually threatens to be better than McAvoy, with her fiery intensity and inherent sweetness working in conjunction while aiding in the construction of a memorable character that elevates the film.

Anya Taylor-Joy is tremendous in the film as well. She has become somewhat of a modern indie scream queen, with another remarkable breakthrough performance in The Witch last year. Split features her in the most prominent role of the three victims, and the proverbial, archetypal “final girl” who ends up saving the day (to an extent) and bringing this film to a thrilling and satisfying conclusion. Taylor-Joy is an actress with so much potential, and it is only a matter of time before she is one of the seminal young performers working today. Her performance is complex and beautifully measured in terms of being equally balanced between terrified and courageous. While it may not be as strong a performance as she gave in The Witch, it is still a great one that features her playing off the psychological aspects of the story perfectly. Haley Lu Richardson is also wonderful, and along with Columbus, 2017 has been a breakout year for her, and I fully expect her to also develop into a respected and versatile actress.

Split is far from perfect, and it actually proves to be exceedingly flawed in a number of ways. One such example is in the writing – there are some truly cringe-inducing moments are forced dialogue, where the phrasing is so weak, not even the attempts to elevate it through delivery works. Split has a great concept, but some of the narrative decisions left a great deal to be desired, and the writing could have been far more focused on representing the story rather than setting it up to be something that it wanted to be but did not succeed particularly well. It would not be a film by M. Night Shyamalan if Split did not have glaring plot-holes and questionable motivations, as well as ambiguous backgrounds of characters that are never truly resolved to satisfaction. I’m not sure why I expected a film by Shyamalan to be exceptionally well-written because while his films may have audacious concepts, as well as marginally-successful executions in some cases, they can sometimes make crashingly-bad narrative decisions that can detract from the film as a whole. Luckily, in the case of Split, it did not hurt the film too much as a whole, because the final product was just too strong to let some slight narrative irritations distract from its sheer audacity.

Split is a triumphant return to form for Shyamalan, and I hope he continues to strive towards this excellent quality of filmmaking. The storytelling may let the film down a bit, but the performances, particularly those from James McAvoy and Betty Buckley, are tremendously good and compensate for all of the weaknesses present in this film. It is far from a film that I would consider one of the best of the year, and it really pales in comparison to some of the director’s previous work, but it is an entertaining, thrilling piece of escapist horror, and if this film is anything to go by, M. Night Shyamalan may just have returned to his status as a director capable of making complex and audacious films. If we are looking at the horror renaissance that we are currently in, Split may not be as much of a towering masterpiece as Get Out, but it is a riveting and often extremely terrifying psychological horror film, and while it is not a major work, it is certainly memorable. I cannot wait to see what Shyamalan does when he merges the worlds of Unbreakable and Split in his next film, and I truly hope he can sustain this quality.