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Review: M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Split’ Has Personality. O.K., Personalities. Lots.

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By A.O. Scott

• Jan. 19, 2017

At once solemn and preposterous, sinister and sentimental, efficient and overwrought, “Split” represents something of a return to form for its writer and director, M. Night Shyamalan. Or maybe I should say a return to formula. The movie, shot in and around Philadelphia, Mr. Shyamalan’s hometown, proceeds nimbly and with suave misdirection toward a pair of rug-pulling final twists that an attentive viewer will probably be able to anticipate. It’s not exactly a Choose Your Own Adventure, but you can opt either for the pleasure of surprise at the end or for the satisfaction of working out the puzzle as you go along.

Thanks to “ The Sixth Sense ” and “ Unbreakable ” back around the turn of the century, Mr. Shyamalan stands as a pioneer of spoiler-centric cinema. Like those movies, and like his later, lesser entertainments (“The Village”; “The Happening”), “Split” is all plot, an ingenious (and also ridiculous) conceit spun into an elegant ribbon of suspense. The less said about that plot, therefore, the better.

Movie Review: ‘Split’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “split.”.

In “Split,” three teenage girls are kidnapped by a man with multiple personality disorder. In his review A.O. Scott writes: At once solemn and preposterous, sinister and sentimental, efficient and overwrought, “Split” represents something of a return to form for its writer and director, M. Night Shyamalan. The movie proceeds nimbly and with suave misdirection toward a pair of rug-pulling final twists that an attentive viewer will probably be able to anticipate. The film is lurid and ludicrous, and sometimes more than a little icky in its prurient, maudlin interest in the abuse of children. It’s also absorbing and sometimes slyly funny.

What I can safely divulge is that three teenage girls are kidnapped after a birthday party by a close-cropped guy named Dennis in a buttoned-up shirt. He is obsessed with cleanliness, and he sounds weirdly like John Turturro for a guy supposedly from Philly. In fact, Dennis is played by the soft-eyed, shape-shifting British actor James McAvoy, as are the other 23 personalities residing in the body of a guy who shares the surname of a famous (and famously odd) Philadelphia-born artist .

These “alters” — a word familiar to fans of the Showtime series “United States of Tara” and other pop-cultural treatments of a controversial and often poorly understood psychological disorder — are a diverse bunch. Some are male, some female, at least one is a child (named Hedwig) and another (named Barry) is a gay stereotype. What they want with their captives is not immediately clear. What Mr. Shyamalan wants is to strip them down to their underwear and to explore, exploit and occasionally subvert the basic tropes of the female-victim psycho-slasher movie.

One of the young women — a gothy, spooky misfit named Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) — is singled out for special attention from the camera (though not, at least initially, from Dennis and his colleagues). Her fellow abductees, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula), alternate between panic and defiance, but Casey counsels patience and watchfulness. Flashbacks to a hunting trip she took as a 5-year-old (Izzie Leigh Coffey) in the company of her father (Sebastian Arcelus) and uncle (Brad William Henke) seem to explain the source of her survival skills, though it turns out that those memories have another, darker meaning as well.

Dennis and company, meanwhile — it’s mostly Barry, actually — consult with a therapist, Dr. Fletcher, who lives alone in a gracious, book-stuffed rowhouse and who is played by the wonderful Betty Buckley. Dr. Fletcher’s primary function is to explain the movie to the audience, foreshadowing the climax with her heterodox pseudo-scholarly theories about her many-sided patient, but Ms. Buckley also provides a dimension of warmth and wit that “Split” would be much duller and uglier without.

Mr. McAvoy, for his part, revels in the chance to use his sensitivity for evil, and to showboat his way through a series of appropriately overwrought characterizations. This breathlessly melodramatic thriller shouldn’t be taken as a psychological case study, any more than Mr. Shyamalan’s laughable “Lady in the Water” should be mined for clues about the habits of film critics.

“Split” is lurid and ludicrous, and sometimes more than a little icky in its prurient, maudlin interest in the abuse of children. It’s also absorbing and sometimes slyly funny. Some years back — it’s startling to contemplate just how long ago it was — Mr. Shyamalan was puffed up into a cinematic visionary, hailed on the cover of Newsweek as “The Next Spielberg.” That hype (and his own self-aggrandizing tendencies) placed a disproportionate burden of significance on a filmmaker who has always been, at heart, a superior genre hack.

“Split” is being released by Universal under the Blumhouse label, a brand associated with unpretentious, clever, neo-traditionalist scare-pictures like “Insidious,” “Paranormal Activity” and “The Purge.” That seems like the right company for Mr. Shyamalan, and the January pre-Oscar doldrums may be the perfect moment to appreciate his skills. He is a master of mood, pace and limited perspective, moving the camera so that the thing you most desperately want to see — and are most afraid of seeing — remains teasingly out of sight.

He uses Ms. Taylor-Joy’s enormous dark eyes as a mirror and a lure for the audience’s attention. He delays the inevitable, inevitably deflationary revelations for as long as possible, minimizing the obligatory third-act flurry of chasing, fighting and bloodletting. And he sneaks in a few self-referential winks, including an allusion to his last really good movie that feels at once like a promise of better mischief to come and an implicit apology for all the disappointment in between.

A film review on Friday about “Split” misstated the movie’s rating status. It is rated PG-13, not R.

How we handle corrections

Split Rated PG-13. Not superbloody, but supercreepy. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes.

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Film Review: ‘Split’

A welcome return to form from 'The Sixth Sense' director M. Night Shyamalan, whose unhinged new mind-bender is a worthy extension of his early work.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Multiple personality disorder, like amnesia, is one of those aberrant mental states that has been a curse to those who suffer, but a gift to screenwriters over the years. From Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” to Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill,” filmmakers have long exploited how little we truly understand about the condition — though none has pushed it quite as far as  M. Night Shyamalan  does in “ Split ,” treating dissociative identity disorder not as the twist, but as the premise on which this wickedly compelling abduction thriller is founded: James McAvoy  plays a lunatic kidnapper with at least 23 personalities to his name.

Rest assured, there are plenty of proper twists to follow, none more unexpected than the fact that Shyamalan himself has managed to get his groove back after a slew of increasingly atrocious misfires. To be fair, it’s hard to imagine any writer/director sustaining a career based almost entirely on surprising audiences. And though he lost us for a while there — water-intolerant aliens, anyone? — by trading on ingenuity rather than big-budget special effects, Shyamalan has created a tense, frequently outrageous companion piece to one of his earliest and best movies.

But Shyamalan isn’t the only one getting a makeover here. Presumably tired of playing handsome, uncomplicated leading men, McAvoy — a talented Scottish actor best known as the young Professor X in the “X-Men” prequels — has recently expanded his repertoire to include unsavory creeps in films such as “Trance” and “Filth.” Those roles may as well have been practice laps for the Olympic main event that is “Split,” in which his performance is splintered between a gay fashion designer, a renegade nine-year-old, an obsessive-compulsive control freak, and a crazy church lady, among others.

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Shyamalan introduces these wildly different personae one at a time, revealing them through the eyes of the movie’s three main characters, a trio of teenage girls taken prisoner from a high school birthday party, who wake up — like the victims in a nightmarish new subgenre of sadism that includes films like “Saw” and “10 Cloverfield Lane” — in a bunker-like cell with only the dimmest clue of the fate that awaits them. Popular above ground, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are the first to panic, reacting as most audiences probably would in their shoes, while brooding outsider Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) seems unusually calm … at first, at least.

Trapped underground in an undetermined location (the actual spot is the film’s next-to-last twist), the girls spend several days trying to devise ways to escape. Each attempt will have moviegoers digging their fingernails deeper into their armrests, as McAvoy’s totally unpredictable character manages to gain the upper hand, while the girls try to make sense of the information before them. Meanwhile, to make things a bit easier on the audience, their captor slips out at regular intervals to visit his shrink, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley, the classic “Carrie” actress who also appeared in Shyamalan’s “The Happening”), a sympathetic ear who dispenses exposition by the wheelbarrow.

The more we learn, the scarier McAvoy’s character(s) starts to sound. At the same time, among the would-be victims, only Casey feels fleshed out, as Shyamalan gradually reveals the young lady’s troubled backstory via flashbacks to childhood hunting trips. Taylor-Joy, who recently starred in Robert Eggers’ “The Witch,” has a knack for suggesting dark undercurrents to superficially lovely characters, to the extent that we start to wonder whether McAvoy has meet his match.

Shyamalan’s goal is to keep us guessing, and in that respect, “Split” is a resounding success — even if in others, it could have you rolling your eyes. Still, scaling down to a relatively modest budget and just a handful of locations has forced him to get creative with the script, while a handful of new hires — most notably “It Follows” DP Mike Gioulakis, whose crisp, steady-handed gaze plays against the gritty confusion of the genre — elevate the result in such a way that we’re more inclined to consider the characters’ psychology, even though Shyamalan appears to be making it up to suit his purposes.

Ultimately, “Split” belongs to McAvoy, who has ample scenery to chew, but doesn’t stop there — he practically swallows the camera with his tiger-like teeth. With his head shaved, the actor depends ever so slightly on costume changes (sly contributions from Paco Delgado, who worked on “The Danish Girl”), but otherwise conveys his transformations through body language, facial expression, and accent, as his various selves take “the light” — since, per Fletcher, only one can come out to play at a time. As in “Psycho,” there’s a tendency to over-explain, and while Shyamalan is basically making up rules for dissociative identity disorder as he goes along, the condition has afforded McAvoy the role of his career.

Reviewed at AFI Fest, Nov. 15, 2016. (Also in Fantastic Fest.) MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 117 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release and presentation of a Blinding Edge Pictures, BlumHouse Prods. production. Producers: M. Night Shyamalan, Jason Blum, Marc Bienstock. Executive producers: Ashwin Rajan, Steven Schneider, Kevin Frakes, Buddy Patrick.
• Crew: Director, writer: M. Night Shyamalan. Camera (color, widescreen): Mike Gioulakis. Editor: Luke Franco Ciarrocchi.
• With: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Jessica Sula, Haley Lu Richardson

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Split review – M Night Shyamalan twists again – and again

This suspenseful tale is surprisingly satisfying thanks to clever plotting and a fine performance from James McAvoy as a man with two dozen personalities

T he traditional response with a new M Night Shyamalan movie is, “Oh no, what’s the twist ending this time?” But Split is more of a feature-length twist: its chief antagonist has dissociative identity disorder, which means he cycles between two dozen personalities. It’s lurid and warped and more than a little dodgy, but it comes off thanks to the bravura performance – or performances – of James McAvoy, who throws himself into the role – or roles – with an admirable mix of skill and abandon.

We first meet McAvoy as Dennis, a cross-looking neat-freak who abducts three young women from the shopping mall and imprisons them in his labyrinthine underground lair. But next time he visits them, he’s Patricia, a prim English governess. Then he’s Hedwig, a lisping, nine-year-old Kanye West fan, who warns them about “The Beast”, suggesting this psycho wants to chew on more than just scenery.

The traumatised hostages don’t know what to make of him – or them – though the outsider of the group ( The Witch ’s Anya Taylor-Joy) senses an opportunity. Meanwhile, as Barry, a relatively well-adjusted Brooklyn fashionista, McAvoy is also visiting his therapist, who dishes out pseudo-clinical exposition but shows little concern for what his other personalities might be up to.

Split wants to have its cake and eat it in terms of mental illness, but it’s an unpredictable, suspenseful little tale that comes together surprisingly satisfyingly, thanks to clever plotting and a truly committed performance from McAvoy. Plus a sting in the tail that non-Shyamalanites will find utterly bewildering.

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• Drama films
• M Night Shyamalan
• James McAvoy
• Anya Taylor-Joy

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“i’d had enough with studios”: how beetlejuice beetlejuice convinced tim burton to return to movies, 10 most rewatchable russell crowe movies, ranked, split  is the best m. night shyamalan creation in recent memory, as anchored by a great performance (or, rather, performances) by james mcavoy..

An outsider at her high school, Casey Cook (Anya Taylor-Joy) is begrudgingly invited to a birthday party by one of her peers, Claire Benoit (Haley Lu Richardson) and ends up having to get a ride home afterwards, with Claire and her best friend Marcia (Jessica Sula). However, what started out as a awkward social event suddenly turns into a nightmare for Casey when she, Claire and Marcia are kidnapped in broad daylight by a mysterious man and then taken to his home, unable to make any contact the outside world and with nary a possible escape (nor a clue as to where they might be, save for somewhere underground) in sight.

It turns out the man who kidnapped the three young women is Kevin (James McAvoy), a man with Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID, who has no less than twenty-three personalities - ranging from the obsessive-compulsive Dennis to matriarchal Patricia and boyish Hedwig. As Casey and the others struggle to find an escape from their prison, Kevin's therapist Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley) starts to realize that something is off about her patient... and that it might be related to a sinister twenty-fourth personality that Kevin has mentioned in the past, but whom she doesn't believe is actually real.

Split is the latest original drama/thriller written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, as well as the second collaboration between Shyamalan and low-budget horror/thriller specialist Blumhouse Productions ( Paranormal Activity , Insidious , The Purge ) after The Visit . The relationship between the two filmmaking forces proves to be a fruitful one with Split , in turn allowing Shyamalan to further put his run of critically derided big-budget movies ( The Last Airbender , After Earth ) behind him.  Split is the best M. Night Shyamalan creation in recent memory, as anchored by a great performance (or, rather, performances ) by James McAvoy.

The majority of  Split  unfolds as a single setting drama/thriller, playing to its director's strengths as a storyteller who excels at generating Hitchcockian suspense and tension through minimalism. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of Shyamalan and It Follows cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, Split is visually sharp and creates a pronounced sense of claustrophobia through its framing of the narrow corridors, hidden spaces and rooms that make up Kevin's mysterious underground lair. Split 's low-budget aesthetic fuels its director's imagination in this respect, spurning Shymalan to be more inventive with how he stages and films the more action-driven sequences featured here (in particular, the movie's climax). At the same time, Split as a whole is more intimate in its scope, often using subjective camera angles and perspectives to keep the focus on not only the main character's experiences, but also the performances behind them.

James McAvoy has a habit of delivering fully-committed performances in even subpar fare, but Split provides the actor with a better opportunity to show off his range as Kevin and the twenty-two other personalities that exist within his mind. McAvoy spends most of the film playing but a handful of those personalities (primarily, Dennis, Patricia and Hedwig), yet he successfully distinguishes each of those "characters", as well as those who only make brief appearances here, in terms of their facial and vocal mannerisms alike. Split  explores the intricacies of Kevin's mental condition through the course of its world-building here (more on that momentarily), in the process creating a more complex origin story for McAvoy's antagonist and making him far more sympathetic than your average horror/thriller movie "monster". That being said, Split may, well, split moviegoers over just how successfully it subverts (or doesn't subvert) the familiar trope of a villain who is disabled, either mentally and/or physically.

Betty Buckley is given a much more substantial role in Split than she was as the infamous lemon-drink loving Mrs. Jones in Shyamalan's The Happening , as Kevin's therapist Dr. Karen Fletcher. The Dr. Fletcher character is responsible for delivering much of the "world-building" dialogue here as she explains the how and why behind Kevin's condition in the film - though thankfully, that exposition and "mythology-building" is compelling by itself. While the Dr. Fletcher character herself is interesting in her own right, Split only hints at a more intricate backstory for the character and why, exactly, she connects so well with Kevin and other DID patients. It's possible that a longer cut of the movie better fleshes out Dr. Fletcher's history - and if so, the theatrical version of Split  might have benefitted from exploring more of her personal background.

The Witch breakout star Anya Taylor-Joy delivers another worthy horror/thriller film performance in Split as Casey, the most introverted of the three young women kidnapped by Kevin - as well as the one who has a (tragic) backstory that thematically parallels that of her captor. While Split 's unusual treatment of Kevin's condition will, as mentioned before, likely prove to be a divisive issue for moviegoers, the film's exploration of how emotional and/or physical trauma affects people through Casey's personal story thread, is more conventional but also tasteful and sensitive in its own right. The young women played by Haley Lu Richardson ( The Edge of Seventeen ) and Jessica Sula ( Skins ) end up feeling more like traditional stock horror archetypes by comparison, due to their lack of development, but serve their purpose in the larger narrative well enough here.

Between its precise direction and McAvoy's engaging scenery-chewing performance, Split  is one of Shymalan's better offerings and certainly his most consistent from the past several years, in terms of quality. The film still has some of the now-infamous hallmarks of Shymalan's work over the years (like occasionally stilted dialogue, as well as a somewhat extraneous cameo by the director himself), but at the same time provides evidence of the filmmaker's continued ability to craft a crackling genre film with greater thematic depth than its pulpy B-movie premise suggests. And yes, there is a big reveal in Split - but to say more than that risks spoiling the fun.

Split is now playing in U.S. theaters. It is 117 minutes long and is Rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic content and behavior, violence and some language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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Split (2016) Review

We review the 2016 film Split, which does not contain any significant spoilers.

Everyone loves a comeback story. In sports, in the movies, in life; we enjoy seeing someone get beaten down and told they can’t until, eventually, they can. What was it that Rocky Balboa said? “It ain’t about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward.”

M. Night Shyamalan has been hitting himself harder and longer than most directors could survive. He’s coming back from Lady in the Water , The Happening , The Last Airbender , After Earth, and The Visit , which is a bit like coming back from being shot, stabbed, and buried alive. You can like one or all of those movies, but you can’t escape the fact that most people don’t. A Shyamalan return-to-form feels less like a comeback and more like reincarnation. Or a release from a decade-and-a-half of wacky psychiatric internment.

There was something about The Visit , his last movie before this one, that lent credence to that theory. It felt like he’d been away for a while. Like he was catching up. It presented a white kid rapping and found-footage horror as though they were bold and new, rather than tired and faintly embarrassing. Split , Shyamalan’s latest, feels different still. It feels like he’s finally caught back up again.

Split Review and Plot Summary

I’m as surprised as anyone. I was one of the few people who seemed to enjoy The Visit , but what I enjoyed most about it was how divorced it felt from the broader culture that Shyamalan’s movies used to be at the centre of. He was working with a lower budget and even lower expectations, which obviously helped. You could feel him respond to the challenge of trying to regain his form under those restrictive conditions. And, in fairness, he did manage to open up the format and do something fairly effective with it.

But The Visit wasn’t a flat-out good movie the way Split is, and people didn’t respond to it the way they’re responding to this one. This is the comeback. We know Shyamalan’s partial to a twist, but that his resurgence is a genre movie released in the wastelands of January might be the best he’s ever come up with.

Given the title, it’s hardly surprising that Split mines the misinformation surrounding dissociative identity disorder for its premise. James McAvoy plays a deeply disturbed kidnapper named Kevin with 23 distinct personalities, who stuffs his creepy subterranean lair with three young women who he’s keeping around for initially-mysterious purposes.

Two of the girls are played by Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula , but the one who matters is a standoffish loner brought to life by Anya Taylor-Joy , who you’ll remember as the only good part of Robert Eggers’ The Witch . I probably shouldn’t have to say this given who we’re talking about here, but Split is not a sensitive and measured portrayal of mental illness, and while that didn’t bother me personally, that Shyamalan is literally making up facets of a legitimate psychiatric disorder to suit his narrative purposes is going to seriously p**s some people off.

Yes, I know, it’s just a movie and it shouldn’t be taken all that seriously, but there’s a strong likelihood that highly-fictionalized and insensitive portrayals of real-life issues and conditions probably make life even harder for people who struggle with them. I’m just saying.

What’s undeniable though is that Shyamalan’s loose understanding of DID makes for a hell of horror-movie conceit. The girls aren’t just dealing with one nemesis, but twenty-three separate ones, each with their own distinct personalities, accents and agendas.

The most common are Dennis, a steely obsessive-compulsive control freak, and Patricia, a slightly-crazy church lady, who together embody the mother and father of McAvoy’s internalised family of identities. Their child is a lisping, sinister nine-year-old named Hedwig. He’s creepy in a way that only a grown man asking for kisses can truly be.

McAvoy’s bald and ripped here, which becomes an eerie constant of all the characters he ends up playing, including the women and children. Sometimes a visual cue gives away who he’s supposed to be (a tightly buttoned-up shirt means Dennis; a shawl means Patricia), but just as often it’s not immediately apparent, to the audience, his captives or, at several points, his therapist, Dr Fletcher ( Betty Buckley ).

Shyamalan often cuts away to these wordy scenes in Dr Fletcher’s quaint home-office, where Kevin adopts the personality of Barry, a likeable, presumably-gay fashion designer, while Dr Fletcher continuously battles not just Kevin’s wavering sanity but also the scepticism of her colleagues. See, the good doctor has a long-held belief that people who suffer from DID are capable of transforming themselves not just psychologically but also physiologically, and she sees Kevin as proof of this theory. Which is troubling because the one thing all Kevin’s personalities seem to share is a mutual fear of a hypothetical twenty-fourth personality, whom they have named “The Beast”, and whom they all insist is literally a man-eating monster. Wherever could this be going?

Don’t worry. That isn’t the twist. All of this flagrant narrative absurdity is treated as inevitable, and it’s really just a series of hooks on which to hang a creepy, exactingly well-executed psychological thriller. These days Shyamalan is best-known for his pretentious auteurist nonsense, but the fact remains that he’s an extraordinarily gifted director of schlocky suspense, and his material has a habit of teasing out great performances. We get two here: McAvoy’s, obviously, which is the best of his career and reason enough to see the movie on its own, but also Taylor-Joy’s, who has a remarkable screen presence and perhaps, when asked to show more range, could become Hollywood’s next great young actress.

Is the movie Split good?

There are problems, of course. For all his talents as a shot-maker and a builder of suspense, Shyamalan has never been a particularly great writer, and the scenes with Dr. Fletcher are so leaden with ham-fisted exposition that they’re impossible to take even halfway seriously. More egregious is a running subplot, told in flashback, that’s supposed to explain why the heroine is better-suited to deal with the issue at hand than her fellow captives, but it ultimately just ends up feeling exploitative and unpleasant in a way that’s quite arbitrary; inappropriate, tonally-askew deviations being yet another item on the long list of things a Shyamalan picture seemingly must include.

Still, on balance, Split is an extremely distinguished variety of lurid B-movie pulp, and it’s absolutely the best Shyamalan movie since Unbreakable . And the ending? Jesus f*****g Christ. You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.

What did you think of the 2016 movie Split? Comment below.

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Split Review

20 Jan 2017

117 minutes

Split (2017)

Around the turn of the century, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan essentially created his own genre with The Sixth Sense , Unbreakable and Signs : suspenseful character studies with a paranormal vibe, a reverse spoof approach whereby subjects (ghosts, superheroes, alien invaders) usually played tongue-in-cheek are presented in high seriousness, through intense, anguished central performances from established male movie stars, and the sort of last-reel twists associated with The Twilight Zone (all Shyamalan’s other traits can be found in Rod Serling, as it happens). One sign of Shyamalan’s success is that other people started making M. Night Shyamalan-type movies: Joel Schumacher with The Number 23 , Alex Proyas with Knowing .

Perhaps as a response to becoming an imitable brand and perhaps down to the muted (and sometimes peculiarly hostile) response to The Village , Lady In The Water and The Happening (all interesting films), Shyamalan moved away from his personal cinema to take shots at fantasy ( The Last Airbender ), sci-fi ( After Earth ) and found-footage shocker ( The Visit ). With Split , he returns to ‘Night Classic’ mode. We’re back in sombre Philadelphia where soft-spoken, well-heeled folks go quietly mad and a psycho thriller plot evolves into something weirder on the boiling-a-frog principle of slowly adding bizarre, freakish elements to an extreme case study. This time, perhaps frustrated by the attention paid to his most easily parodied habit, Shyamalan holds off on a twist in favour of a measured development of a far-out premise, though an intensely fan- satisfying development pops up near the end.

All actors want to play Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and McAvoy seizes with obvious relish on the role of one man with 23 personalities due to be usurped by a 24th who is more animal than man. Head finely stubbled as his Professor X cut grows out, he uses a few props (glasses, a woolly hat) but mostly conveys Kevin’s alters — who range from a gay fashion designer through an OCD caretaker and a sinister British matriarch to a tittering child — with changes of expression and voice. It’s a show-off tour de force, and McAvoy is dazzling throughout — funny, creepy, threatening, pathetic and monstrous by turns. Note especially set-pieces like his perfectly uncoordinated demonstration of what a nine-year-old might think are radical dance moves, and the unsettling moments where one of Kevin’s more controlled, sinister personalities impersonates a more open, appealing one to reassure his analyst (Betty Buckley) that things aren’t going south in his skull.

As often with Shyamalan, the actual plot is less important than the character business. Even Kevin loses interest in two of his young captives, who get shoved into storerooms as misfit Casey (Taylor-Joy) emerges as the heroine, realising she’s most likely to survive by engaging with her captor than by crawling through ventilation ducts or relying on teen-princess karate lessons. That Casey’s life experience has prepared her for the ordeal is established in tactful, unsettling micro-flashbacks which feature standout work from Izzie Coffey, whose wide eyes perfectly match Taylor-Joy’s. After The Witch and Morgan , Taylor-Joy is shaping up as the weird chick of her generation — but she has to work as hard as her character to find her screen-space here when her co-star is busily upstaging himself, let alone her.

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'Split': Review

By Tim Grierson, Senior US Critic 2016-11-17T11:08:00+00:00

Dir/scr: M. Night Shyamalan. US. 2016. 120mins

An abduction thriller in which the danger emanates from others but the true terror is within, Split is a highly effective, nerve-shredding horror movie that makes the most of its claustrophobic setting, familiar setup and psychological gimmicks. James McAvoy is an arresting menace as a man suffering from 23 — or is it 24? — distinct personalities, and the performance is both a feast of unsettling intensity and good-old-fashioned hammy theatrics.

Shyamalan and his cast keep finding clever ways to sidestep familiarity to give their film its own personality

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s low-budget treat savours its midnight-movie creepiness, and yet its gripping finale turns out to be more emotional than one might expect. Split will open in the US on January 20 and while the Shyamalan name has lost its lustre in recent years — although his 2015 found-footage horror movie The Visit was a quiet success, grossing almost $100 million worldwide on a reported $5 million budget - McAvoy and rising star Anya Taylor-Joy will help boost Split’ s visibility, as will strong reviews.

Taylor-Joy plays Casey, a teenaged loner who is kidnapped after a classmate’s birthday party, alongside the more popular Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula). The man who nabs them (McAvoy) at first appears to be a tidy, fussy sociopath, instructing them not to leave the locked room where he’s holding them captive. But he returns several times, and in each instance he exhibits a different personality — whether it’s as an elegant woman or a mischievous little boy.

Thanks to separate scenes in which he meets with his counsellor, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), we learn that Kevin has 23 distinct personalities, all warring inside him. But what’s even more concerning is that a new personality, whom he refers to ominously as The Beast, is fighting to emerge.

Shyamalan establishes an air of dread from the opening abduction, and Split initially plays out like a typical beautiful-young-women-in-danger kidnapping thriller. (Rest assured, each of our three female protagonists will be in different states of undress or flashing ample cleavage at key moments.)

The film’s B-movie aesthetic is enhanced further by McAvoy’s confidently showy performance, which feels like an homage to Psycho ’s Anthony Perkins and other actors who have played imbalanced bogeymen. Mental-health advocates may object to Split ’s somewhat cavalier attitude toward Kevin’s condition, which mostly serves as a means to make the character seem creepy and give McAvoy an opportunity to bounce around between colourful personalities. But with that said, the actor brings genuine pathos to the portrayal, expressing a vulnerability within Kevin that, if anything, only makes this unpredictable antagonist more frightening and troubling.

Daringly, Shyamalan tries to draw a parallel between Kevin and Casey, who soon becomes the film’s central focus. Through judicious flashbacks, Split hints at incidents from the teenager’s early childhood that have left a permanent mark on her. In her own way, Casey is wrestling with demons as profound as Kevin’s, and Shyamalan grounds the proceedings in credible psychological underpinnings that make the eventual cat-and-mouse battle between the two characters emotionally compelling as well as increasingly suspenseful.

Although Casey isn’t a particularly well-drawn character — Kevin and his personalities dominate Split — Taylor-Joy (The Witch ) shows a ferocious grit as a long-time survivor determined to stay alive. Richardson and Sula have little to do, but Buckley is excellent as a brilliant therapist who specialises in personality disorders, her conversations with Kevin consistently riveting. If Shyamalan executes the demands of the close-quarters thriller fairly effectively throughout, it’s these smart, unsettling scenes between Buckley and McAvoy where he gets to show off his ability to create tense moments from seemingly simple situations.

Split boasts a wonderfully funky atmosphere, thanks in large part to cinematographer Mike Gioulakis and production designer Mara LePere-Schloop. Kevin’s underground lair is just drab and rundown enough to feel both ordinary and disturbingly alien, leading to a powerful final showdown between Kevin and Casey that legitimately raises the stakes and believably ties into their backstories. The movie’s barebones construction may not be very inventive, but Shyamalan and his cast keep finding clever ways to sidestep familiarity to give their film its own personality.        

Production companies: Blinding Edge Pictures, Blumhouse Productions

Worldwide distribution: Universal Pictures, www.universalpictures.com

Producers: Marc Bienstock, M. Night Shyamalan, Jason Blum

Executive producers: Kevin Frakes, Steven Schneider, Ashwin Rajan

Cinematography: Mike Gioulakis

Production design: Mara LePere-Schloop     

Editor: Luke Ciarrocchi

Music: West Dylan Thordson           

Website: www.splitmovie.com

Main Cast: James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula

• United States

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‘Split’ Movie Review: One of M. Night Shyamalan’s Best Films

James McAvoy delivers a riveting performance as a man with 23 personalities in Split , the latest thriller from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan. Coming off a lengthy run of critically panned movies, M. Night returns to his The Sixth Sense form with this chilling psychological horror film. Split proves Shyamalan still has entertaining stories to tell and that he can still deliver an ending with an unexpected ‘gotcha’ twist.

McAvoy plays Kevin Crumb, a man with dissociative identity disorder whose many personalities struggle for control. We catch up with him at a period in his life when the least desirable and most dangerous of his personalities has taken control. Forcing the other personalities into submission, two terrifying personalities – clean freak Dennis and matronly Miss Patricia – mind the store, so to speak, making the decisions while completely suppressing all but one of the other personalities. Hedwig, an enthusiastic nine-year old, sides with Dennis and Patricia in their quest for control of Kevin’s mind and body. Hedwig’s allowed to be the dominant personality on occasion, but he’s kept in line by Dennis and Patricia’s talk of a terrifying entity.

Free of the shackles of other personalities, Dennis kidnaps three high school students – best friends Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula), plus outcast Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) – and locks them up in his underground lair. Kevin’s other personalities use what little time they can manage to be in charge to send urgent emails and texts seeking help from their psychiatrist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who begins to wonder what’s going on that has Kevin’s personalities so anxious and afraid.

M. Night Shyamalan made absolutely the right choice in casting McAvoy in the lead role. McAvoy is completely convincing in his portrayal of multiple personalities jockeying for control within one man. It’s a wildly divergent batch of characters that McAvoy throws himself into, the best of which is a fashionista named Barry who’s flamboyant and non-threatening. McAvoy’s such a chameleon that each of the personalities introduced to the audience is fully fleshed out and a complete individual. He deftly slips from character to character, going all in on each one and making it easy for the audience to differentiate who’s who.

McAvoy grabs so much of your attention that the performances of the three actresses who play the kidnapped girls, as well as the always terrific Betty Buckley, are overshadowed. Of the three kidnap victims, it’s The Witch ’s Anya Taylor-Joy who stands out and who gives us someone we can root for. Taylor-Joy’s Casey quickly transforms from victim to fighter, defiantly standing up to her kidnapper even when the odds are heavily stacked against her escape.

Split has a few decent jump scares but it’s McAvoy’s performance more than any single scene that makes this horror film such a wild ride. Oh, and that ending! Shyamalan has reason to be proud of Split ’s twist. I can pretty much guarantee no one will see it coming.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic content and behavior, violence and some language

Release Date: January 20, 2017

Running Time: 117 minutes

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Split Reviews

Split is Shyamalan's return to his early 2000's self (...) James McAvoy delivers his career-best performance.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 24, 2023

McAvoy's performance is most effective during the subtle changes in his body language as he shifts from one personality to the next...

Full Review | Feb 27, 2023

Shyamalan sticks his ending with an insanely clever twist I never saw coming and that immediately compelled me to see the film again.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 25, 2022

Delivers a tense and entertaining B-movie experience that seems to revel in its performers and the novelty of its plot, albeit in fun and not-so-self-serious ways.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 5, 2022

An absence of the standard Shyamalan twist is notable... showing how much the director has matured over the last decade. In Split, hes created a film that rivals the films that once made him one of Hollywoods hottest young directors.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 21, 2022

McAvoy delivers one of the best performances ever. A psychological thriller that's aided by its score but the acting is the standout.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 25, 2022

I do think the tension really builds in a very horrific way where it feels very conversational and then, yeah, the horror creeps.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 28, 2021

Wild and wooly, uniting, for the first time in a long time, Shyamalan's talent for keeping the audience on the edge of their seats and his ability to change the game in the final act.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 28, 2021

Split departs from anything writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has done before, bringing an honestly thrilling story to life, with one of his best twists since The Sixth Sense.

Full Review | Jan 2, 2021

There's a slowness to the story, coupled with aggravating mistakes by supporting roles, which inspire the opposite of chills: exasperation.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 5, 2020

A B-movie masquerading as a Hollywood production.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 24, 2020

McAvoy is deliberately unnerving for such a challenging and difficult role. He sends your emotions into a chaotic disarray...There are no boundaries and that's terrifying to even contemplate.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 17, 2020

It's a slow burn, intelligent thriller that properly amps up its tension in the final act, and contains a standout performance from McAvoy.

Full Review | Jul 14, 2020

This is old-school Shyamalan: great suspense, disturbing plot and fabulous protagonists. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 2, 2020

James McAvoy's phenomenal performance almost saves "Split."

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jul 2, 2020

I had mixed feelings about this movie. I actually kind of really liked this movie for the first 80 percent of it and then the ending just really ruined it for me.

Full Review | May 8, 2020

It was like a really cool, interesting study about psychology and then it became a Grimm's fairytale.

Split has a lot of issues, but they are manageable and are easily outweighed by a pair of sublime performances. I have mixed feelings about the work, but I'm leaning toward recommending it.

Full Review | May 1, 2020

While Split isn't exactly a thoughtful look at the struggle of a man plagued by mental illness, it's not really trying to be that. It sets out to be an entertaining genre exercise and a fun time at the movies, and it succeeds.

Full Review | Feb 19, 2020

James McAvoy helps save M. Night Shyamalan from himself in Split...I'm disappointed by some of Shyamalan's choices in this film, but Split is still worth seeing in the theater for McAvoy's brilliance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 24, 2020

Den of Geek

Split Review

Split is a thrilling return to form for M. Night Shyamalan that proves he still has many new tricks up his sleeve.

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M. Night Shyamalan, master of the twisty high-concept thriller, seemed to have lost his way for a while there. But a little more than a year since reinventing himself with the found footage thriller  The Visit , the Philly filmmaker returns with a movie that’s likely to re-endear himself to the fans who’ve been unsatisfied with his post- Unbreakable  work.

Split  starts with teenager Casey ( The Witch ’s Anya Taylor-Joy) attending a party where she clearly was only invited due to pity. Without a ride home, the father of another classmate agrees to drive Casey back, but what she and the two other girls (Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula) don’t realize is that this papa isn’t driving their car. He’s been replaced by Kevin (James McAvoy), a dangerous man who abducts them and then locks the girls in his basement, where they soon learn that their kidnapper is suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). He has 23 distinct personalities to be exact.

While at a glance,  Split  might begin somewhat like last year’s abduction thriller  10 Cloverfield Lane , it soon veers off into far more “Shyamalan-esque” territory. We start to learn more about Kevin and his personalities through his sessions with psychiatrist Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who thinks that his more “unstable” personas, i.e. Dennis and Patricia, might be coming to the forefront. Through this period, the film also flashes back to Casey’s youth when she’s deer hunting with her father and uncle, and we learn more about why she has such a steely nature when faced with such adversity.

Casey also shows the most sympathy for Kevin and his various personalities, or at least the ones he allows her to see, including Patricia, his more feminine side who empathizes with the girls’ situation more than the meticulously clean freak Dennis. Dr. Fletcher mainly deals with Barry, a talented fashion designer, having banned Dennis and even Patricia from the sessions. Casey is especially taken by Hedwig, as Kevin regresses to his nine-year-old self, although they each tease of something more dangerous arriving. Eventually.

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Kevin has successfully compartmentalized these different sides of himself into their own personalities, each with their own attire and mannerism, which is why more than anything, the film makes a great platform to display the many talents of the underrated McAvoy, who proves that he can deliver quite a range of eclectic emotions when given a decent role. From the effeminate Barry to the nine-year-old Hedwig—who has a penchant for mean dance routines—McAvoy is so endlessly entertaining in this role that your own reactions are likely to be similar to the abducted young women’s perpetual state of shock.

Anya Taylor-Joy gives an equally compelling performance as a character who has been damaged in her past, perhaps as much as Kevin, and she plays well off McAvoy. The same can be said about stage legend Betty Buckley, who allows everything that Dr. Fletcher says about Kevin’s DID to be believable. And giving any sort of weight behind this movie’s science certainly helps the film’s veracity. Similarly, Shyamalan has always proven himself to be good with characters and dialogue, and both skills are on full display here, even with some of the smaller supporting roles. In fact, this may be his best screenplay in 10 or more years.

Still, there are things that certainly might make you scratch your head, especially as the last act gets a little out of hand in terms of keeping track of what is happening, or who is in control of Kevin’s body at any given time. That ends up leaving more questions than answers, but you’ll want to make sure to stay through the end credits for a very welcome surprise for long-time Shyamalan fans.

Split  opens nationwide on Friday, Jan. 20.

3.5 out of 5

Edward Douglas

Based in New York City, Edward Douglas has been writing about movies for 14 years, including his weekly movie preview column The Weekend Warrior. He's a…

• Universal Pictures

Summary Though Kevin (James McAvoy) has evidenced 23 personalities to his trusted psychiatrist, Dr. Fletcher (Betty Buckley), there remains one still submerged who is set to materialize and dominate all the others. Compelled to abduct three teenage girls led by the willful, observant Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Kevin reaches a war for survival amon ... Read More

Directed By : M. Night Shyamalan

Written By : M. Night Shyamalan

Where to Watch

James McAvoy

Dennis, patricia, hedwig, anya taylor-joy, casey cooke, haley lu richardson, claire benoit, jessica sula, betty buckley, dr. karen fletcher, izzie coffey, five-year-old casey, brad william henke, sebastian arcelus, casey's father, ukee washington, news anchor, game show enthusiast, robert michael kelly, m. night shyamalan, jai, hooters lover, rosemary howard, kevin's mother, jerome gallman, vince, security guard, academic moderator, kate jacoby, dr. fletcher's patient, peter patrikios, taxi driver, flower kiosk worker, roy james wilson, security guy with dog, critic reviews.

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Teen girls in danger in smart, satisfying, scary thriller.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Not a lot of overtly positive messages messages, b

Casey is a survivor, clever and self-reliant under

Women are kidnapped and locked up. They're treated

Teen girls are forced to remove articles of clothi

One use of "f--k" and an abbreviated use of "mothe

Adults drink cans of beer during a deer hunt.

Parents need to know that Split is a smart, satisfying horror thriller from Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan. It's about a man (James McAvoy) with multiple personalities (aka dissociative identity disorder). Violence and scariness are the big issues here. Characters die, women are kidnapped…

Positive Messages

Not a lot of overtly positive messages messages, but the film does explore the unknown possibilities of the human body -- and how a certain state of mind can exert control over our physical selves.

Positive Role Models

Casey is a survivor, clever and self-reliant under pressure. She stands up for herself and thinks clearly in a crisis, although she gets very little reward for her strength.

Violence & Scariness

Women are kidnapped and locked up. They're treated roughly and sprayed with a mace-like knockout spray. A man holds a knife to a girl's stomach. A man is hit with a chair. A young woman's stomach is ripped open (very brief). A man squeezes a woman around her middle, breaking ribs/spine. Characters die. Fighting with baseball bat. Sounds of ripping/eating a human body. Suggestions of an abusive uncle-niece relationship; a teen girl is shown with multiple scars on hr stomach and arms. Rifles and shotguns seen/used; shots are fired. A small girl points a rifle at a man. Characters hunt deer in the woods; dead deer seen. Offscreen attack.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Teen girls are forced to remove articles of clothing; they're shown in bras, panties, and other underthings. Reference to a man who "likes to watch young girls dance naked." Reference to a "prank" in which teen girls grab a man's hands and put them on their breasts. Strange, brief, comical kiss, with a reference to "being pregnant."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

One use of "f--k" and an abbreviated use of "motherf----r," as well as two uses of "s--t," plus "blow me," "ass," "damn," "hell," "Jesus," and "God" (as exclamations).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Split is a smart, satisfying horror thriller from Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan . It's about a man ( James McAvoy ) with multiple personalities (aka dissociative identity disorder). Violence and scariness are the big issues here. Characters die, women are kidnapped and hurt, and a young girl is abused by her uncle (though there's not a lot of gore or horror, and much takes place off screen). Characters fight; one is hit with a chair, and others are threatened with baseball bats and knives. A body is briefly shown with its stomach ripped open. Rifles and shotguns are seen and sometimes fired; characters hunt deer. Teen girls are forced to remove some of their clothes, revealing their bras, panties, and other underthings. There are also spoken sexual references, as well as infrequent swearing (including one "f--k," plus "s--t," "ass," and more) and some social drinking by adults. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 40 parent reviews

An outstanding film with incredible acting but it's very important not to let any kid under 14 watch it.

What's the story.

In SPLIT, teen birthday girl Claire ( Haley Lu Richardson ) is finishing up a party with her friend Marcia ( Jessica Sula ). But her "mercy invite," troubled Casey ( Anya Taylor-Joy ), can't find a ride home. Claire's dad prepares to drive them, but then a mysterious man ( James McAvoy ) kidnaps all three girls and locks them in a windowless room. They notice that he acts strangely, showing different personalities and holding conversations with himself. Unbeknownst to the girls, the man goes to see his therapist, Dr. Fletcher ( Betty Buckley ), who tries to communicate with his 23 personalities. But he warns her of the coming of "the Beast," an all-powerful monster that could be a twenty-fourth -- and who might just have an appetite for teen girls.

Is It Any Good?

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan launches a full-fledged comeback with this tense, satisfying horror-thriller. Split is refreshingly infused with thoughtful ideas and sly suggestion, rather than gore or brutality. Shyamalan has had quite an up-and-down career; in 2016 he tested the waters with the small-scale The Visit , and he now makes a bold return to his Sixth Sense and Unbreakable glory days. Split actually resembles the latter film in some ways, rooted in real-world theories about the elastic limits of human possibility.

As ever, the director's camerawork is above reproach; he creates a sinister, windowless, underground lair, smoothly snaking with corridors, dingy doors and pipes, and harsh pools of light. His writing is subtler here than in other films, with a few odd touches but confident overall. Best of all are the two leads: Joy ( The Witch ) has an awesome, ethereal presence, and McAvoy conveys at least a half-dozen of his character's personalities with an uncanny, haunting clarity. Split is a smart movie that will undoubtedly leave viewers thinking -- and discussing.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Split 's violence . How much takes place on screen vs. off? Does that approach soften the impact of the violence ?

Is the movie scary ? Why or why not? What tools and tricks do filmmakers use to scare viewers? Why is it sometimes fun to be scared?

How does Split compare to other movies about dissociative identity disorder (multiple-personality disorder)?

Do you believe the human mind is capable of asserting control over the body, possibly correcting and curing diseases and disorders or gaining strength?

How does Split compare to Shyamalan's other movies? How is it similar? How is it different? What is he known for?

Movie Details

• In theaters : January 20, 2017
• On DVD or streaming : April 18, 2017
• Cast : James McAvoy , Haley Lu Richardson , Anya Taylor-Joy
• Director : M. Night Shyamalan
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Latino actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Horror
• Run time : 116 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : disturbing thematic content and behavior, violence and some language
• Last updated : May 12, 2024

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“The Edge” is like a wilderness adventure movie written by David Mamet , which is not surprising, since it was written by Mamet. It's subtly funny in the way it toys with the cliches of the genre. Too subtle, apparently, for some; I've read a couple of reviews by critics who think director Lee Tamahori (“ Once Were Warriors ”) misses the point of the Mamet screenplay and plays the material too straight. But if he'd underlined every laugh line and made the humor as broad as “ The Naked Gun ,” would that have made a better picture? Not at all.

Although Mamet, a poet of hard-boiled city streets, is not usually identified with outdoors action films, “The Edge” in some ways is typical of his work: It's about con games and occult knowledge, double crosses and conversations at cross-purposes. Its key scenes involve two men stalking each other, and it adds to the irony that they are meanwhile being stalked by a bear. “Most people lost in the wild die of shame,” the older character tells the younger. “They didn't do the one thing that could save their lives--thinking.” The setup: Billionaire Charles Morse ( Anthony Hopkins ) flies his private plane into the Alaskan wilderness so that fashion photographer Robert Green ( Alec Baldwin ) can photograph Morse's wife, a famous model (Elle Macpherson). Leaving the wife behind at a lodge, the two men and a photographer's assistant fly farther into the bush, and when the plane crashes and the pilot is killed, the three survivors are left to face the wilderness.

At this point we can easily predict the death of the assistant ( Harold Perrineau ). He's an African American, and so falls under the BADF action movie rule (“The Brother Always Dies First”). The redeeming factor in this case is that Mamet knows that, and is satirizing the stereotype instead of merely using it. His approach throughout the movie is an amused wink at the conventions he lovingly massages.

Now Charles and Bob are left alone in the dangerous wild. Charles luckily is a very bright man, who just happens to have been reading the book Lost in the Woods, and has the kind of mind that absorbs every scrap of information that floats into it. Before the movie is over, he will fashion a compass from a paper clip, build a bear trap, make fire from ice and explain how you can use gunpowder to season meat.

Charles is also smart enough to suspect that Bob has been having an affair with his wife. “So how are you planning to kill me?” he asks. The catch is that each man needs the other to survive, and so a murder, if any, must be postponed or carefully timed.

The movie contains glorious scenery, quixotic Mamet conversations, and of course the obligatory action scenes. Even in generating tension, the movie toys with convention. As a bear pursues them, the men desperately bridge a deep chasm with a log, and hurry to cross it--not sitting down and scooting as any sensible person would, but trying to walk across while balancing themselves, like the Escaping Wallendas. Meanwhile, the bear, which often seems to have its tongue in its cheek, stands on the far edge and shakes the log with both paws.

There are a few bear-wrestling matches and a big showdown with the beast, but the movie doesn't lose its mind and go berserk with action in the last half hour, as most action films seem to. (One of the enduring disappointments for the faithful moviegoer is to see interesting characters established in the first two acts, only to be turned into action puppets in the third.) It is typical of Mamet that he could devise his plot in such a way that the climactic payoff would be not bloodshed, but the simple exchange of a wristwatch.

Having successfully negotiated almost its entire 118 minutes, “The Edge” shoots itself in the foot. After the emotionally fraught final moments, just as we are savoring the implications of what has just happened, the screen fades to black and we immediately get a big credit for “Bart the Bear.” Now Bart is one helluva bear (I loved him in the title role of “ The Bear ”), but this credit in this place is a spectacularly bad idea.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Edge (1997)

Rated R For Language and Some Adventure Gore/Violence

118 minutes

Anthony Hopkins as Charles Morse

Alec Baldwin as Robert Green

Elle MacPherson as Mickey Morse

Harold Perrineau as Stephen

L.Q. Jones as Styles

Kathleen Wilhoite as Ginny

Directed by

• Lee Tamahori
• David Mamet

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