Split

Driving home one day, you’re abducted and wake up imprisoned – what could be worse? What if your captor has 24 different personalities and one of them is called… The Beast?

This is the premise for the twelfth film by M. Night Shyamalan – the director of Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Visit and The Village. When Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) first sees Kevin (James McAvoy), straight away she thinks there’s something unsettling about him. Little does she know…

She awakes to find herself in an underground cell, trapped with two other teenage girls. Casey suspects that they’re being kept for a reason, and that that reason can only be monstrous… Things go from bad to worse when they realise that their captor has dissociative identity disorder. He has 24 distinct personalities living in him, and one is so terrifying that the others are afraid of it and call it The Beast?

Anna Taylor-Joy is a talented up-and-coming actress and is utterly compelling as a woman desperately trying to hold it together and escape from this life-or-death situation, though James McAvoy is a tour de force – in every one of his roles. M. Night Shyamalan works his magic again in this latest offering – a tense and disturbing journey that grips you from beginning to end.