I’m in two minds about M Night Shyamalan’s multiple personality thriller. On the one hand, thanks to James McAvoy’s agility juggling the many people who inhabit the head of Kevin Wendell Crumb, it marks a definite return to form for Shyamalan. On the other, as with so many of the convoluted high concepts that he grapples with, there’s a laboured quality to the storytelling, as if the screenplay is always running to catch up with the ambition of the conceit.
Although there is less of the visceral brutality of Alexandre Aja’s Switchblade Romance, there is something of that film’s oppressive threat here. The three girls kidnapped by two of Kevin’s renegade personalities are imprisoned in a set designer’s dream job – a network of subterranean cells that becomes the physical representations of Kevin’s many identities. Guiding us through the chaos of the central character’s minds is his therapist, Dr Fletcher (Betty Buckley), an expert in dissociative identity disorder, who suggests that the condition might have a supernatural component, thus permitting a fairly preposterous climax. Two things are missing from the film: first, the satisfying Shyamalan twist and second, and perhaps more importantly, scares.
