This past weekend we went to see Split. I have been waiting for this movie for a while now. I’m a huge fan of James McAvoy and especially like his movies with a psychological undertone. I’ve seen Filth, which was a bit depressing, and absolutely loved Trance.

Image source www.movienewsguide.com

This review contains spoilers.

The movie is about a man named Kevin Wendell Crumb. As a child he had an abusive mother and this caused the young boy to develop 23 distinct personalities. In the movie we are only introduced to 8 of the 23 personalities. McAvoy does an amazing job in portraying all of these personalities. In the movie there is a scene where, faced with the death of Kevin, all the personalities takes a turn in the “light” within a matter of minutes, each with their own manner of speaking, voice, gestures, reported age and physical features, for example Dennis, a big bulky guy is strong and can carry a girl around like she’s nothing while Hedwig, a 10 year old boy personality can’t even push a door open while the girls push it closed. Here McAvay was just brilliant. Its movies like this that shows just how versatile an actor can be.

I’ve always thought that its amazing that a person could split their personalities, I know that its  because of trauma that this disassociation happens but its still amazing to think that our minds can help protect us by developing different and sometimes stronger personalities.

In Split, Kevin has more docile personalities and then he has what the other personalities call “The Horde” which consists of the more dangerous/volatile personalities that Kevin possesses. These are the personalities that are more bad-ass, so to speak. For example, Dennis is a perfectionist, that came to the fore when Kevin was just 8  years old. Kevin’s mother was abusive but if everything stayed clean then she would punish Kevin less, therefore the perfectionist Dennis was a real saviour in this situation.

Overall the movie focused on how one personality may have a physical illness etc while the others had not, it also refers to a study found in 2015 of a blind women who lost her sight after a traumatic event in her 20’s that suddenly regained her eyesight in 8 out of her 10 personalities. According to the study the women’s brain scans showed that her sight spontaneously recovered. Source www.medicaldaily.com  The movie therefore focused on the assumption that if a personality believes something to be true it could happen. For example Jade, one of Kevin’s personalities, had diabetes while the others did not, even though they all live within one person.

The 24th personality the trailer talks about is called THE BEAST by the others, according to Dennis’s description of THE BEAST, he is much bigger than all the other personalities, he has long fingers that enables him to climb walls like a spider and his skin is impenetrable, he also feeds on young girls…EEEEK. When the Beast finally makes his appearance all these unbelievable characteristics are in fact true.

I really loved the movie although I thought that it dragged on a bit long before reaching the climax.

What did you think of this film?