Split doesn’t live up to its hype

The movie Split was absolutely terrible. When I saw the cover for the film I was expecting a car chase thriller but that was not the case.

The movie was actually about a guy who has multiple personality disorder and kidnaps three teenage girls from their dad’s car.

The three girls are abducted and are forced to live in a location that is completely disclosed until the last five minutes of the movie. I was confused the whole time because the movie’s expository structure only allowed the audience to figure everything out in the last 5 minutes.

There was no character development at all in the film, which really takes away the audience’s ability to feel composure for anyone in that film which is vital in this type of movie.

The main antagonist, Kevin was treated terribly as a child by his mother (although this is very important it is only subtly mentioned and not really elaborated on). Because of that type of treatment his mind created multiple personalities (23 of them).

After many years only three personalities preserved their dominance and they hatched a plot to unleash a superhuman personality.

This movie could have been better if the writer didn’t add this supernatural element into the film. Adding the superhuman personality completely shifted the movie from being about the three girls but being about Kevin (sound familiar?).  This movie was a lot like Psycho, because it had the same structure.

There are parts in the movie when Kevin is carrying on a conversation with himself.

The movie starts out being about the girls and then shifts to being about a serial killer psychopath and shifts again to one of the three girls.

This girl is the only girl to make it out alive and she is spared only because she had dealt with pain her life. This concept is completely untouched until the end.

This expository story telling really killed the potential that this movie had. There was nothing special about the way it was shot either. There were no cinematic tricks or shots that made it stand out in anyway. There were a series of flashbacks but they didn’t really help with anything. They just gave the audience more content to be confused about.

One thing to appreciate about this film has the be the fact that it didn’t contain that much gore. For people who actually knew what type of movie they were seeing, they probably were expecting a lot of blood and gore but that wasn’t what the movie had.

It contained subtle blood hints but overall it wasn’t that bloody. In conclusion this film was a complete bust at least for me. I liked the potential it had but it didn’t live up to that potential making it an utter failure.