BEFORE: This has not been a great movie week for women - we had the mother with the terminal illness in "A Monster Calls", then the sexual assault that took place in "Atonement", now tonight it's kidnapping and possibly worse. Things aren't really looking good for the rest of the week either. But hey, that's why these films are on the January schedule and not part of the February romance/relationship chain.
To be fair, it hasn't been a great week for men, either - we lost a lot of good soldiers on "Hacksaw Ridge", then there were priests being tortured in "Silence", and men being hunted by Alaskan wolves in "The Grey". What a fun week...
James McAvoy carries over from "Atonement"...
AFTER: Possible spoilers in the review tonight, there's no way around some of them. If you haven't seen this film yet, then proceed at your own risk.
This is another spin on the "survival film" genre that's taken off in the last few years, the "locked-room" horror film. I watched both "Room" and "10 Cloverfield Lane" last year, two other examples of this sub-genre. Now this film comes along, with THREE girls kidnapped and held underground by a seemingly-insane man who has a split personality. And what he does to these women, it's so gruesome I can barely talk about it - he keeps them in a room and he makes them watch his one-man show, where he plays all 23 of the diverse characters, male and female! And this is the really horrible part, the show is unfinished, it's STILL IN THE WORKSHOP STAGE! Oh, God, I can't even imagine, those poor girls. I know that I'd be thinking, "Why doesn't he just KILL us already?"
OK, I'm sort of kidding about that last part. But this film does play out as a bit of an acting display for McAvoy. This is the sort of role that probably any actor would jump at, in order to prove the range of what they can do with different voices, postures, and body language. Can anyone possibly keep 23 different characters separate and distinct? Actually, I think the movie cheats a bit, because there are only 9 different personas named in the IMDB credits. But it's still a challenge for the actor to perform, and for the audience to keep track of. What makes "Dennis" different from "Barry", or how are we supposed to tell when he's "Patricia" and when he's "Jade"?
Now, are there REALLY people in the real world with split personalities, or is this just a movie thing? I remember reading something somewhere about how this is no longer considered a genuine medical condition - but no filmmaker has ever let them stop that in the past, so why bother to do five minutes of research now to see if the film you want to make is close to accurate? I'll look it up now (which I guarantee you, no writer did before making this film...). Hmm, I guess it's called DID now, which is "Dissociative Identity Disorder". But even the Wikipedia page acknowledges that increased rates of this disease could be due to factors such as media portrayals - in other words, people think they have this disease because they saw a movie about it. Otherwise it seems to be an offshoot of PTSD brought on by trauma or abuse, where the "real" personality is hiding behind one or more others.
Some research also claims that the therapeutic techniques used to treat this disorder are also part of the problem, that therapists looking for this condition could unwittingly suggest to people that they have it, and this triggers the condition itself. Jeez, the search for the cure is part of the problem, it figures. But anyway, let's assume for the moment that this condition is a real thing and proceed from there. There are still a few narrative problems here, namely that we don't know which persona was in control when the three girls were kidnapped - was it Kevin, the primary, or Dennis, or Barry? Or some combination of them working for some other purpose? Any attempts to mollify the situation ("Oh, he just likes to watch girls dance...") don't achieve the desired effect, because when someone kidnaps people and locks them in a room, it's never for a good reason.
(EDIT: Marvel Comics had a mutant character like this, with many different personalities, called Legion. They had a TV series on FX last year that was all about this character trying to deal with his condition and integrate his different personalities. The added twist was that he might have absorbed some of the personalities from other mutants, who died during that process, and the most evil one in his head wasn't really him, but recurring X-Men villain Shadow King. Now, in the comics, Legion was the son of Professor Charles Xavier, and who's played Professor X in the recent X-Men movies? Right, it's James McAvoy...)
There are rules to dealing with the different personalities, as the girls soon learn, and some of the personas have OCD, which you might think keeps things neat and tidy, but this is a NITPICK POINT to me. If several of them have OCD, why haven't they worked out a schedule where each persona gets allotted exactly 4.34% of the day? Because the lack of a system means complete chaos, and that's what someone with OCD can't stand.
Then the possibility rises that the 23 personalities are preparing the way for a 24th, known as "The Beast". I won't spoil anything about this here, but obviously it doesn't sound good. It's another NITPICK POINT to me why this nutjob needs to leave home and go to the train station at this point, like he's picking up someone coming in from out of town. Umm, that's just not the way this works, a new personality doesn't arrive by Amtrak. That whole sequence seemed weird and out of place, even in a movie about weird stuff.
And my final NITPICK POINT is that in the same film that seems to have an agenda at first telling us that there are people with this condition who have learned various coping mechanisms and, with therapy, are able to hold down jobs and be productive members of society - because not everyone with DID is a psycho or a killer, and some people come to realize that their affliction is also a gift. Well, that would be fine if the main character didn't turn into a psycho and a killer. Wait, what was the point you were trying to make again?
And I guess it figures that a film about a split personality would have a split timeline. But at least the one here just toggles between two timelines, the main one and flashbacks one of the girls has from when she was a small girl. There are a lot of things that are just a little too coincidental where the flashbacks are concerned, but I can't really harp on this, I'm forced to allow it.
And then there's the fact that this was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, which means two things - he's going to make a cameo appearance, and there will be some kind of twist or reveal at the end. The one here serves to connect this film to the larger M. Night world (the "Shymalan-iverse") but I'm not sure I understand why. It certainly helps if you've seen his other films, I guess. (Umm, no, not that one - the other one.)
(EDIT: I forget one last NITPICK POINT, when the therapist addresses the patient and she wants to know which personality is currently in control, she asks questions like, "To whom am I speaking with?" Ugh, that's too many prepositions AND she ended the sentence with one of them, a language no-no. I guess they didn't teach any grammar in whatever school she studied psychiatry or psychology. There are at least a dozen better ways to ask this, or just drop one of those prepositions, please.)
Also starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley (last seen in "Another Woman"), Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula, Izzie Coffey, Brad William Henke (last seen in "Pee-Wee's Big Holiday"), Sebastian Arcelus, Neal Huff, Kim Director, with cameos from M. Night Shyamalan, (name withheld).
RATING: 5 out of 10 security cameras
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