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Canberra Today 13°/17° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Split’ (MA) ** and a half.

FROM writer/director M Night Shyamalan comes a horror film with the theme of Multiple Personality Disorder (a.k.a. Dissociative Identity Disorder), a topic popular with filmmakers with nothing better to do. 

Playing a man with 23 personalities, male, female, some still children, others well-developed adults (with one more waiting in the wings to emerge and put the others to shame), James McAvoy joins some of cinema’s most notable psychotic anti-heroes (for starters, think Tony Perkins in “Psycho”, Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”, Anthony Hopkins in ”The Silence Of the Lambs”).

Let’s call him Barry. Dr Fletcher (Betty Buckley) treats him as a harmless unfortunate about whom she may in time write a famous research paper. But on the day in question, Barry hijacks the car in which the dad of Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) has offered to give two of her high school classmates (who dislike her lots) a lift home after school.

This sets in motion about 100 minutes of psycho-babble and implications of brutality during which Barry descends from a nutter into a ravening beast about to submit those three little darlings to dreadful discomforts before consigning them to unspeakable endings.

We’ve seen this sort of stuff before and I guess we’ll see it again some day. There is a market for it. In “Split”, the sole merit is McAvoy’s performance.

No search hue-and-cry gets raised when the girls go missing. And why does Dr Fletcher take so long to perceive the risk to the community that Barry presents? Both those shortcomings are down to the writer. And through the imprisonment of the girls runs an implication of sexuality, which the writer didn’t want to risk an X rating by showing.

At all cinemas

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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