M Night Shyamalan’s new movie Split just came out last weekend starring James McAvoy and it will keep you on your toes, uncontrollably crunching your popcorn while you are trying to figure out what in the world is going on.  

This movie wasn’t scary like some people might think it would’ve been. Even if there are no jump scares, it’s a movie that will keep you on the edge of your seat. It is a lot better than other thriller/horror movies because it’s not scary as there are possessed people jumping out at you, but because the actual plot of the movie is suspenseful and you don’t know what’s going to happen.

One thing that was great about this movie was that the cinematography added to the story. It wasn’t always a still landscape view of the scene. Sometimes the camera’s view would be what the character were seeing, like if they were lying down the room would be sideways or the close-ups of the character’s faces and what they were doing was great.

The first 30 minutes is a bit slow because the viewer is still trying to figure out what is going on, but it picks up after that. There are flashbacks to Casey Cook’s, the lead female played Anya Taylor-Joy, that didn’t really make sense until the end of the movie. Other than the slow beginning and random, almost seemingly pointless flashbacks, the plot to the movie was well-written and I give props to M Night Shyamalan for a great nerve-racking movie with an actual plot.

In the beginning, the movie seemed like it was going to be an average thriller movie of some insane man kidnapping some girls and the rest of the movie is just the girls trying to get out. Maybe I’m looking too philosophically into this, but the movie does seem to have an underlying meaning that Shyamalan wants to convey.

***Spoiler Alert don’t read on if you want to go see the movie and don’t want it ruined***

James McAvoy played his character, Kevin, very well. Kevin has DID which is a dissociative identity disorder and McAvoy portrayed about 6-7 out of 23 personalities that were trying to fight for power of Kevin’s body. There was a range of personalities from a man with OCD to a 9 year old boy to a woman who wanted to unleash the Beast. The Beast was the 24th personality that was hidden and was going to unleash soon to eat the girls that Kevin has kidnapped.

As noted before, the trailer as well as in the beginning of the movie did make it seem as if this movie was going to be an average teeth-grinding movie, but as it went on, the story got deeper and deeper. The flashbacks of Casey and Kevin show that they both had guardians or parent figures that were abusive. Kevin’s doctor thinks that his disorder derives from the abuse from his mother. Casey is the only one of the three girls kidnapped to realize that there is something more to the situation than an insane psychopath trying to dance with them.

By the end of the movie, the other two girls die and only Casey is left trying to escape. The beast is trying to run after her to kill her, but when he takes one good look at her, he realizes that she’s broken too and not everybody has this fake persona of trying to seem perfect. I may be looking too deep into this, but that is what I took away from the ending scene.

This movie is supposedly related to M Night Shyamalan’s movie, Unbreakable from 2000, because at the end of the movie,as the news about Kevin is being shown at a diner, Bruce Willis appears and mentions to some people next to him that Kevin is similar to Mr. Glass, a character from Shyamalan’s Unbreakable movie. It was expected that Shyamalan was going to throw in a plot twist into the movie, but it was very surprising that he does it in his other movies instead. Nobody knows that Split is a comic book movie until the very end. Up until the last scene of the movie, everybody thinks it is a psychological thriller movie. That is what makes this movie great is that it’s unpredictable and doesn’t come full circle until the very end.

The plot for this movie was definitely shown because it wasn’t just a movie full of jump scares, but intrigued you throughout the whole movie and kept you on the edge of your seat. Just like any good movie, the cinematography added to the story intrigued the audience. I would give this movie a solid 9/10 for great cinematography, plot, and is an overall great movie.