Split

Split arrives as a curious artifact of contemporary horror filmmaking, one that manages to be simultaneously engaged with and hostile toward the very concept of neurodivergent representation. M. Night Shyamalan's film centers dissociative identity disorder not as a condition deserving empathy or nuanced understanding, but as the root cause of villainy and predation. The result is a work that generates substantial cultural conversation about mental illness, yet does so in a manner that mental health advocates uniformly characterized as stigmatizing and harmful. One might say this represents a failure of the progressive sensibilities the film inadvertently courts through its earnest engagement with psychological complexity.

The film's treatment of its female characters follows familiar patterns of victimization cinema. Anya Taylor-Joy's Casey survives through a combination of trauma knowledge and passivity rather than agency. The other kidnapped girls exist primarily as collateral damage in Kevin's internal war. There is no meaningful feminist consciousness at work here, no interrogation of gendered violence that might elevate the material beyond exploitation. The casting of Taylor-Joy, a young actress of mixed racial heritage, provides surface-level demographic representation that the narrative itself refuses to acknowledge or develop.

What emerges from Split's modest cultural footprint is less a work of progressive cinema than a cautionary tale about representation without responsibility. The film grossed over $200 million worldwide on the strength of McAvoy's committed performance and the thriller's structural competence. Yet its legacy among disability advocates and mental health professionals remains uniformly negative. This is a film that talks about difference while visibly recoiling from it, a horror movie that treats neurodivergence itself as the true monster. The irony appears to have been lost on no one.