An incredible performance, fantastic characters, and an excellent new look on mental illness– the premier of the new movie, Split, wowed its audience. M. Night Shyamalan’s most praised films including Signs (2002), The Sixth Sense (1999), and The Visit (2015) were all reviewed mostly by the amount of horror and gore that they contained, but Shyamalan’s newest, Split, can be analyzed in more ways than just those related to horror. Split will not only keep an audience on the edge of their seats, but it also brings forward aspects of comic relief and it allows the audience to form opinions of their own regarding the main character’s psychological state.

The movie begins with three teenage girls, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula) who are kidnapped from a parking lot and thrown into a room that had already been pre-arranged for their arrival. The movie takes a real twist when Shyamalan reveals to the audience that their kidnapper, Kevin (James McAvoy), has an extremely rare dissociative identity disorder in which his body holds 24 different personalities. His personalities all were established with different names such as Barry, a good, middle-aged man who is allowed to bring each personality “into the light,” Miss Patricia and Dennis, two personalities who are to be kept out of the light according to Kevin’s psychiatrist, Dr. Fletcher, and Hedwig, a nine-year-old boy. The biggest twist is the final 24th personality that Kevin claims is getting ready to take the light, the Beast. McAvoy plays them all as distinct characters and as different parts of the almost completely unseen Kevin. Casey, who soon becomes the leader of the three abductees, has to resort to deceiving the personas to get out.

Without revealing too much, it can be said that the movie takes an interesting twist towards the end, and it easily left viewers shocked and wanting more. Shyamalan’s latest can be classified as more than a horror film, leaving the audience feeling a variation of emotions with the most prominent emotion one of sympathy towards McAvoy’s character.