The Atlantic

M. Night Shyamalan's <em>Split</em> Is a Creepy, Guilty Pleasure

In his new film, which features a brilliant performance from James McAvoy as a man with 23 personalities, the oft-derided director may have finally found a return to form.
Source: Universal Studios

To all of the shocking developments of the last 12 months, we may now add yet one more: M. Night Shyamalan has made a good movie.

Or perhaps that’s overstating it a bit. The writer-director’s latest offering, Split, is more good-bad, a B-movie that earns itself no better than a solid B. That said, given the precipitous grading curve down which Shyamalan has been slaloming for well over a decade, this is a moderately remarkable achievement.

A quick recap, for those whoin 1999, Shyamalan followed up with the quite-good , and the intriguing but not-quite-successful . And then his filmmaking promptly fell off a cliff: , , ( that it necessitated inventing the “”), , and . His most recent film, 2015’s , was than its predecessors and therefore widely mistaken for being good, which it wasn’t.

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