"Split" seeks to understand its killer, but it's a less-than-satisfying horror thriller.

M. Night Shyamalan’s last film, The Visit (2015), gave me such a kick, that I found myself eager to see his next, Split, which opened this weekend. But where The Visit was inventive and playfully scary, Split is almost moralistic, and develops a rather peculiar message about empowerment that doesn’t quite work. In Split, three teenage girls are kidnapped at a shopping mall and held prisoner in some dark, windowless, labyrinthine place, by a man with 23 distinct personalities (played by James McAvoy). When he visits his idealistic New York headshrinker (played by Betty Buckley, who's wonderful in this, and whom horror fans will remember as the well-meaning gym teacher in the original Carrie) he presents himself as Barry, a likably awkward neurotic with a penchant for fashion. But of course, Barry is the docile cover for a whole menagerie of malicious personas, two of which have been “banned” from the sessions because they seem to be plotting a takeover of Barry’s mind.

Buckley’s character, Dr. Karen Fletcher, is an expert on Barry’s particular disorder, but she’s become rather precious about it: She lectures—via Skype—to a group of students in Paris about her patients achieving a higher form of existence through this disorder, which, she argues, is a kind of gift achieved only through intense personal trauma, a blessing wrought by a curse. Dr. Fletcher claims to have witnessed patients who can be blind with one identity but sighted with another; she claims another patient has one personality who’s diabetic, while the rest of his personalities are not. In essence, Dr. Fletcher argues, the mind has more control over our bodies than we realize, and our brains have the power to transform us into superhuman gods, if we know how to harness that power. (You can probably see where this is going.)

I don’t ever need to see Split again, but it is a diverting thriller despite its flaws, and to Shyamalan’s credit, he resists the urge to turn the movie into a police procedural (Law and Order and CSI et al have permanently established those kinds of stories as the exclusive domain of television.) Indeed, I kept waiting for a bunch of New York detectives to enter the movie as supporting characters, but they never did. We’re either in the lair with the three girls, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Marcia (Jessica Sula), with Barry (and his various other personalities), or with Dr. Fletcher, who gradually pieces together the fact that something is very, very wrong with her prized patient. (More wrong than usual, that is.)

But Split isn’t nearly as scary or crazy as it thinks it is. Shyamalan has created a monstrous character but isn’t willing to show him at his worst, because he’s so horrifying. (There’s none of the dread we feel, for example, when we see Buffalo Bill in his lair, making dresses out of skin, in Silence of the Lambs.) McAvoy tries very hard, and yet he’s never scary enough, or threatening enough, because Shyamalan wants to humanize him, so he creates another persona called “The Beast”, another identity that is welling up inside of him, one more terrifying and destructive than any other. Because Shyamalan is priming us for the Beast’s big entrance, he must restrain all of Barry’s other personalities (including the ominously docile Miss Patricia, who’s British and wears shawls and long dresses). Shyamalan attempts to grapple with a person who’s both good and evil, but his strategy doesn’t work, because by the end, he’s exhausted our patience.

The strongest scenes in the movie are the first two, perhaps because they are so compact: We see Claire and Marcia with Claire’s dad, at a restaurant, celebrating Claire’s birthday, while Casey, whom Claire has reluctantly invited out of sympathy, stands by a window, staring into the distance. In that scene, Claire bemoans having to invite Casey at all, but then congratulates herself on not being a monster, the kind of mean girl who excludes the weird kid from the party. Then, in the next scene, when the girls are kidnapped, Shyamalan structures it perfectly, resisting the urge to make us jump, instead letting the terror gradually wash over us: As Claire’s unsuspecting father loads gifts into the trunk of the car, the girls get inside: Claire and Marcia in the back, distracted by their phones, and Casey in the front, feeling alone but not being alone. Then a man gets into the driver’s seat: Barry, who’s presumably disposed of the father. The girls in the back don’t even notice right away; it’s Casey who realizes what’s happening, and, in a surprising and fascinating choice, Casey is given a moment to escape but chooses not to.

Casey, we learn through flashback, has suffered in life, as has Barry. And it’s that suffering that both unites them and ultimately empowers Casey to defeat Barry. Split elevates the damaged kid as a kid who has felt the broken reality of the world, unlike the Claires and Marcias of the world, who have lived sheltered, comfortable lives with stable parents. But Split is grasping for profundity in the most obvious way. Perhaps Shyamalan is congratulating himself for resisting cheap scares, and perhaps he’s apologizing for his depiction of people with psychological disorders as mad killers, by elevating the abused child as some kind of hyper-sensitive god. But he’s also given a scientific answer for why all those other movie killers—the Michael Myerses and Jason Voorhees of the world—could never be killed for good; they keep coming back for more teenagers. Perhaps those psycho-killers also possessed this “gift” of transforming into superhuman personas. Shyamalan has concocted a pseudo-scientific explanation for these movie killers, including his own, forgetting that what we don’t understand is always more terrifying than what we do.

"The Edge of Seventeen" will ring true at 17, and 37, and probably 107.

Movies like The Breakfast Club resonate with us when we’re young because they validate our emotions without even a hint of criticism or irony. But when we look back on these films as adults, we may find they no longer speak to us in the same way: the problems that seemed large and insurmountable at 16—distant or demanding parents, alienation from peers, confusion about our identities—may have faded into the background of our lives (or maybe not); and while those problems mattered and do matter, their teeth aren’t as sharp as they used to be, or we’ve grown tougher and more resilient, and gained some valuable perspective, with age. The Edge of Seventeen, a new comedy-drama about teen angst, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, succeeds marvelously at sympathizing with its main character, the unhappy high school girl Nadine (played by Hailee Steinfeld), without pandering to young people. It’s clear from the beginning that while Nadine’s problems are real and difficult, she isn’t the center of the universe, and, by extension, nor are the young viewers who might find in The Edge of Seventeen their own version of The Breakfast Club. Part of Nadine’s emotional journey, in fact, is recognizing that it’s not all about her.

The heart of the story involves the giant rift between Nadine and her best friend, Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), who unexpectedly falls in love with Nadine’s charming, seemingly perfect older brother Darian (Blake Jenner). Nadine only has one friend, and all the important high school gods—of good looks, of popularity, of Straight A’s, of athletics—have smiled on Darian, and half-heartedly smirked in Nadine’s direction. She’s got her personality—which is funny and intelligent when she’s not terribly self-conscious, which is almost never—and her humor, which tends to irritate rather than amuse. Nadine is also dealing with the unexpected death of her dad, and the subsequently strained relationship with her mom (Kyra Sedgwick), who relies too much on Darian now that her husband is gone. 

Steinfeld, whom readers probably remember as the fiery, determined young heroine of the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (2010), gives a funny, big, yet controlled performance. Nadine is by turns irritating, gauche, impulsive, and ultimately, lovable. She also cannot control the things that come tumbling out of her mouth. In multiple scenes, Nadine chides herself for her awkward behavior, and screams at herself, “Why do you say these things?” Those of us who, like Nadine, weren’t coasting on our good looks in high school (although Hailee Steinfeld is certainly a lovely young woman), can probably relate to this. We had to work at developing our personalities, and anytime we spoke, it was like we were taking our driving tests without any practice. The art of saying the right thing at the right time takes a lot of work for most of us, and before we perfect it, we’re all falling flat on our faces most of the time. (Now of course, these moments of verbal awkwardness are seared into the permanent record of social media and Youtube.)

Woody Harrelson gives another of the film’s standout performances, playing Nadine’s history teacher Mr. Bruner. During lunchtime, Nadine frequently sits in his classroom and dumps all her problems on him while he tries to savor his 30 minutes of peace. The teacher obviously cares about Nadine, but he often responds to her woe-is-me attitude with smart-ass quips. When she shows him an explicit text message she accidentally sent a boy on whom she has a crush, Bruner reads it aloud and then chides her for using run-on sentences. Their relationship is a prickly one, a kind of love-hate tennis match, and one more unexpected delight in a movie that repeatedly goes against the conventions of teen movies.

Sometimes, I think about what Ally Sheedy says in The Breakfast Club: “When you grow up, your heart dies,” and I feel that John Hughes cashed in on a huge lie: that life peaks during adolescence, and that the big emotions we experience in high school have to define us. Our hearts don’t die just because we become more able to deal with problems, and the things we said and did and experienced in high school do not have to define us. Kelly Fremon Craig understands this, and, perhaps that is why she doesn’t reduce the teenagers and parents in her film to good guys and bad guys; nor does she reduce young people to stereotypes. And while I still love all those 80s teen comedies because they’re my nostalgia, I’m not sure I would have loved them if I’d seen them as an adult when they first premiered. The Edge of Seventeen is sharp enough and honest enough to appeal to both a teenager and a grown-up, and while it may mean something different to the 17-year-old girl who falls in love with it and the 37-year-old woman she becomes, I think it will always ring true.

Note: I'd be remiss without citing the performance of Hayden Szeto, who plays Nadine’s friend Erwin, a budding young filmmaker. (The short film he makes is absolutely delightful.) Erwin is just as awkward as Nadine, and the friendship—and romance—that develops between them feels real and lasting.