By RICHMOND B. ADAMS & CAITLIN COODY
Split reminded me of Philadelphia (1993), in that it tried to explore several ideas with the result that none received their due. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring James McEvoy, the film centers around Kevin Crumb a man with 23 (and, as it happens, 24) personalities rooted in child abuse, and who kidnaps three teenage girls to serve as “sacred food” for the emerging “Beast” or, in a not successful connection with Friedrich Nietzsche, “Superman” of human evolution. At least that’s how Kevin expresses himself through the various personalities that are both planning the sacrifice and competing with one another.
As Kevin holds the young ladies hostage, in particular Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy, who played a difficult role with appreciable efforts at understatement), he (or various of his personalities) visits with Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), a psychiatrist whose life work has been an effort to deny that Kevin’s dissociative personality disorder has resulted in the emergence of the superhuman and cannibalistic Beast. In watching Buckley’s performance, it became all too easy to see her as Abby Bradford from Eight is Enough, a television show from the late 1970s in which her character emphasized the good despite periodic confrontations with domestic upheaval. Buckley’s present portrayal is simply Mrs. Bradford plus forty years, and it blinds her to the monster within Kevin (and, as the film tries to suggest, all of us) who lives just underneath the surface of civilized behavior.
The film lunges to its end with Casey, whose flashbacks to her own childhood abuse frame the way she escapes from the Beast, being escorted through the entrance area to the Philadelphia Zoo as she is overseen (naturally) by statues of lions, apes, and assorted emblems of those fit to survive in the all too human jungle. Coupled with awareness that Casey may be returned to her abusive uncle, the film muddles itself even further by never what it wants to do. McEvoy is miscast, and the attempts at horror are simply not frightening. Split is what it conveys: divided and unreconciled. One and one-half stars from five.