★★★☆☆
James McAvoy plays a man with 23 different personalities, with the less-than-pleasant 24th about to emerge, in Split. Directed by M Night Shyamalan, the horror-thriller is full of plot holes, but McAvoy’s joyful and menacingly lunatic performance papers over most of them.
Our shaven-headed villain has multiple-personality disorder and in his incarnation as Philadelphia building janitor Mr Dennis he kidnaps three (inevitably very pretty) teenage schoolgirls and locks them in a basement. The problem is that every time he unlocks the door he seems to be a different person: the American Mr Dennis is superseded by the English headmistress-type Miss Patricia, with the addition of high heels and a skirt, while a nine-year-old boy, Hedwig, later emerges.
Meanwhile another persona, the camp fashion designer Barry, goes to visit his therapist, Dr Fletcher (Betty Buckley). She is perhaps a little too sympathetic to his cause, writing academic papers that suggest the multiple personalities are not necessarily a disorder but perhaps a superior gift.
Back in the basement, the hysterical, high-heeled girls Marcia (Jessica Sula) and Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) are grounded by the more watchful and smart Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy, who was rather good in the recent The Witch). Casey has a dark past of her own, seen in flashbacks to childish hunting trips with her father and uncle. Luckily, she can handle a shotgun.
There’s plenty of tension in the conversations between the girls and their mercurial captor and a series of stupid escape attempts. Irritatingly, Shyamalan somehow ensures the teens’ lipstick remains glossy and hair bouffant, while they lose most of their clothes down to their bras. Still, the movie provides plenty of twists and turns, although it seems a cop-out to have the talented McAvoy concentrate on five personalities when he could easily have given us the full 24. The final chap out of the mixed bag is a vein-popping muscled superhuman and with this, sadly, the film jumps the shark.
15, 117min