But just as he’s about to make his catastrophic assault on Casey, he sees that her body is scarred (it’s unclear whether the scars are the result of torture or of self-inflicted wounds) and stops himself, telling her, “You are different from the rest.” Recognizing a fellow-victim, he bestially roars, “Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved! Rejoice!” Desperately fleeing, Casey reaches a barred-in place that might be safe-except that, with a physical transformation to match his mental one, the Beast has a Hulk-like super-strength and is preparing to bend the iron bars in order to seize her. It comes as the movie’s dénouement, after Casey sees that the Beast has killed Marcia and is killing Claire. Kevin himself, in his demonic incarnation as the Beast, emphasizes Casey’s decisive difference from her friends. Casey lost her illusions at the age of five (she’s played, as a child, by Izzie Coffey) and has been a psychological combatant ever since. Shyamalan suggests that the two “normal”-i.e., unabused and cheerful-girls are living with fatal illusions of safety, unprepared to face the threats that lurk behind the façade of decency with which their well-meaning but ineffectual parents have shielded them. Rather, she attempts to probe his psychology and, in effect, to work a sort of mental jiu-jitsu in which she tries to get him to release her on the basis of a decision that he himself (his many selves) reaches.

Because she has experience with a predator, she doesn’t try to resist, flee, or submit to her captor. Casey’s weirdness and introversion is traced to this abuse. Flashbacks interspersed throughout the action reveal that she was sexually abused by her uncle (Brad William Henke)-and that, after her parents’ death, this uncle became her guardian. The girls react differently to their captivity-Claire and Marcia are frankly oppositional, intending to escape or, where possible, to fight, and neither succeeds. The setup involves Claire’s birthday party, supervised by her cheerful parents-her father (Neal Huff) is a stereotypically goofy white suburban movie dad, complete with dad jokes-and it’s established that her parents insisted that she invite Casey in the name of decency, a charity invitation. Two of them, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula) are popular, regular girls the third, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy), is unpopular, introverted, cantankerous, awkward, weird. The movie’s brief early scenes, leading up to the kidnapping, tag the three teens with facile identities. He holds the girls in an isolated underground industrial warren and his various personae approach them in different ways, with different intentions. Here’s the story: three teen-age girls are kidnapped by a man named Kevin (played by James McAvoy), who suffers from dissociative-identity disorder and has twenty-four different personalities (twenty-three that are on the surface, and a twenty-fourth, the monster of monsters, that emerges near the end). What’s much more important is a surprise that’s integral to the story and equally integral to its societal resonance, which does need a spoiler-alert sign in neon. I’m tempted to say “spoiler alert,” but it’s already all over the Internet: Bruce Willis turns up, playing his character David Dunn from Shyamalan’s 2000 film “Unbreakable,” to do nothing of any note except set up a sequel in which David will combat the antagonist of “Split.” I can’t wait. It also is endowed with what’s being referred to as a surprise ending.

“Split” isn’t especially well made, but it’s very well positioned. The movie commercializes, packages, exemplifies-and safely isolates-authentic phenomena and taps into authentic fears. Yet it’s a hit, and there are good reasons for its box-office success. The rest of the film is the work of a puppet master who works with an admirable but unoriginal industrial efficiency, retrofitting characters and their lives to fit the mechanical dictates of a simplistic scare story. It has a scene early on, centered on a car, that suggests at least an effort at playful inventiveness. It’s easy to mistake a movie’s popularity for an artistic phenomenon rather than a sociological one.

Splitmovies