Breakable: SPLIT

Split is a movie fractured between victims and victimizers. It has a trio of kidnapped girls trapped in a nondescript basement, cowering and terrified and unsure how to fight back and escape. It also follows the kidnapper, an imposing and intimidating man of few words who is also his own victim, as multiple personalities share his mind, some good and trying to push him to do the right thing, others bad, using his body for evil. They all fear The Beast. The movie awaits his arrival, a new, scary personality that will banish all the others and take the body for his own nefarious animalistic purposes. As an M. Night Shyamalan movie, it takes on a fractured quality as well. It’s somewhere between the expensive, expansive, gorgeously designed studio pictures of his early career – masterful thoughtful chillers like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village – and the nastier, scrappier B-movie he’s now making for Blumhouse, starting with found-footage lark The Visit. His movies are quiet, contemplative, and restrained. But now they’ve taken on a grotesque crowd-pleasing edge, this one taking the time occasionally to linger on young bodies in tight undergarments and bloody bites taken out of abdomens. But what joins these impulses is a patience, and a willingness to sit the majority of its runtime in a serious, overwhelming, portentous feeling of impending doom. Cutting between the basement, the man, his therapist, and flashbacks from the lead girl, each gathers its own sick pit of despair, and the only resolution for these damaged characters will be to embrace their damage, and make their pain an asset.

In this way, the unusually structured screenplay goes askew from the predictable, leaning away from simple dichotomies or the expected suspense. It’s not so much about who will escape and who will die. It’s not particularly interested, even, in what will make the violence erupt, though genre dictates it must. Instead, Shyamalan, drifting away from these threads so often it deflates the suspense, makes a strikingly directed film like a high-gloss scuzzy character study. It’s about a man (James McAvoy) struggling with his identity, lashing out with frightening intensity as the eerily composed kidnapper, scolding himself as a matronly planner of this evil, regressing into creepily charming childlike naivete as a perpetual kid personality stuck along for the ride. This is hardly convincing representation of mental illness, but as metaphor for a confused, lonely, traumatized creep desperately trying to pull his life together and make sense of his purpose, it has a cockeyed compelling energy. Add to it the girls he takes – two best friends (Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) and a distant acquaintance (Anya Taylor-Joy) snatched from the parking lot of a teenager’s birthday party – trying to figure him out to stay safe, and it’s startling to see how differentiated McAvoy makes the personalities. When’s he’s the harmless youngster, it’s so convincing the immediate tension deescalates, leaving only the worry another facet of his mind will suddenly reappear. 

Shyamalan – with sharp cinematographer Michael Gioulakis (of the similarly confident widescreen creepy It Follows) – glides the camera down dark hallways, or parks at direct bird’s-eye-view angles to take in the tableaus his designs. A man darts out of the dark, into the searing spotlight of a streetlamp, only to disappear again. The slow opening of a car door suddenly reveals a girl’s presence with the dinging of the alarm alerting the villain that it’s ajar. Shyamalan milks moments for maximum suspense, giving over lengthy scenes to Taylor-Joy’s backstory, a wounding story of trauma with a slow-boil reveal that’s borderline distasteful and deeply disturbing, all the more so for its casual reality and horror exposition backdrop. It starts like one of those explaining-the-final-girl’s-hidden-beast-killing-skills flashbacks, but becomes something far more chilling in its emotional underpinnings, especially when the movie leaves her story’s emotional journey so tense and unresolved. The other prong of the tale – therapist Betty Buckley, whose intense professional interest in her unusual client is nonetheless too slow to stop the story before it starts – is given over to origin-story babbling, overexplaining the fractured state of his mind, and the ability for it to manifest convincingly different physicality as he appears to almost shrink into smaller, meeker personas and expand into larger, domineering ones. Yet it’s of a piece with the movie’s stressed and distressed characters, crumbling under the weight of bearing burdens with which they’ve been cursed.  

This is hardly Shyamalan’s best film, but it carries provocative ideas and confident filmmaking. He once more rides the line between inadvertent silliness and ponderous philosophizing, maintaining a satisfying balance through a mix of controlled, assured blocking – sinister rack focus, suspenseful tracking shots, simmering long takes – and coaxing tremendously full-bodied performances from serious performers giving it full attention with nary a condescending wink. If you’re on his wavelength, you’ll know how effective his techniques remain. Here is the work of a filmmaker flexing his style, noodling around a grabbing high concept to moderate effect. It lacks the artful intent of his best work, and the eager genre thrills of his most misunderstood (charming fantasy misfires Lady in the Water, Last Airbender and After Earth, and ersatz R-rated Twilight Zone episode The Happening). But it has his low-key eccentric personality and no-nonsense visual control, and again proves a big screen Shyamalan experience should always be something of an event.

Look Behind You! IT FOLLOWS

It Follows is a Skinner box for horror nostalgists of a certain vintage. It provokes an unconscious reaction in the genre pleasure centers of those of us pining for vintage John Carpenter craftsmanship, with a healthy respect for old school Val Lewton chills. Its set-up finds the margins of suburbia infected with paranormal stalking a la 80’s shockers. Its pay-off borrows from Cat People’s famous pool scene. This is like a handful of recent horror efforts that gather up strong dread with throwback appeal, eschewing modern shocks and CGI for something simpler and more elemental. Look at James Wan’s The Conjuring, Adam Wingard’s The Guest, and Ti West’s The Innkeepers for other recent movies that wouldn’t have been out of place on Blockbuster’s shelves with the (superior) likes of Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street.

Like those, there’s video-store classicism in writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s approach to It Follows, an art-house meets midnight movie genre effort. He brings a resourceful simplicity to the tension and concept. He makes frames full of ominous negative space, implying danger in even normal moments. He pins his characters unsteadily off-center in the shots, Rich Vreeland’s driving synth-soaked score adding to the unease. Long steady widescreen compositions from cinematographer Mike Gioulakis looking down ordinary sunny suburban streets allow the suspense to take its sweet time inevitably dredging up dread. As it unspooled, I could almost see a retro pulpy tagline: You can run, but you can’t hide, because…IT FOLLOWS.

But what is the “it” in question? It’s unclear, remaining vaguely defined throughout, but it is certainly plenty menacing anyway. Maika Monroe, who appears haunted even before she gets cursed, plays a teen who hooks up with her sketchy new boyfriend (Jake Weary). He promptly disappears, but not before holding her captive and telling her he’s cursed with something deadly. “I passed it to you,” he warns. “It” is a deadly paranormal stalker, able to take the form of anyone. Maybe it’s that old lady striding across the quad. Or is it the creepy kid next door? Or perhaps it’s the tall, dead-eyed man slowly moving down a dark hallway? The “It” is only visible to those with the curse, a ghostly presence at once familiar and fearful, walking forward unshakably. You can run, but it’ll find you, and it’ll kill you.

There’s some close association with Mitchell’s first film, 2011’s tender drama The Myth of the American Sleepover, which followed a group of teens in suburban Detroit as they fumbled through adolescent concerns over the course of one night. It Follows takes place in the same neighborhoods, amongst its lead’s tight group of friends (Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe, Keir Gilchrist) and the boy next door (Daniel Zovatto), as they struggle to help her. They see only her trauma, as she nervously looks around, cringing with the fear of the mysterious something stalking her. They don’t quite believe her, but are willing to help her. It’s a standard horror perspective, a group of young people slowly dragged into paranoid fears. Mitchell pays close attention to the worrying mood enveloping them, drawing suspense out of quotidian hangouts by the ways concern shifts their interactions.

Artfully slow and deliberately (perhaps frustratingly) unresolved, this is a horror picture refusing to be pinned down. The mutable, unknowable nature of the curse –a sort of supernatural STD – has an anesthetized inevitability. Like a slow-motion Freudian Final Destination, It follows a set of rules, passing danger down the line. You can put It off your trail by passing It on, but once It kills the next victim, It’ll return for you. There are a couple great scares involving a figure in the far background of a shot slowly creeping closer to our vulnerable victims in the foreground. Effective modulation of tone brings sudden apparitions just when you think it’s safe. Creepiness is maximized by the unresolved loose ends, mingling unfortunate retrograde slasher-style sex fears with the haunting feeling of regret over a mistake. It can’t be undone. It will follow forever.