Though not a film being spoken about on awards terms, James McAvoy’s remarkable, nuanced performance in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split is likely to be as good as any those nominated for an Academy Award. The actor’s finest turn since Filth, is enough to turn this inane, absurd piece of cinema, into a rather good one.

McAvoy plays, well, several different characters – though for the sake of this review, we’ll stick with his birth name Kevin. Kevin isn’t a very nice chap either, and he abducts three teenage girls, Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), Marcia (Jessica Sula) and the introverted Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) from the formers birthday gathering. Locking them up in his basement, he frequents the girls on a regular basis, though when the doors open, they’re never quite sure who it will be visiting, as Kevin has a split-personality disorder, with 24 different personas. From middle-aged women to nine year old boys, the three girls must try and find a way to manipulate their captor’s condition, and play his different personalities against each other, in a bid to try and find a way of surviving this terrifying ordeal.

Split MoviePartly why McAvoy is so staggeringly impressive in this title, and this is where similarities to his performance in Filth come in – is that he has a distinct vulnerability to his demeanour, and though a menacing, intimidating presence, there remains an empathy throughout, and it’s vital to this film working that we can pity him as well as fear him, and few actors would be able to find that balance in such a triumphant way. His performance deserves better though, as one far greater than the film it’s within. Split has a great, chilling concept but it doesn’t feel as though it’s been left in the hands of the right filmmaker, as Shyamalan seems so intent on shocking the viewer that the subtlety in McAvoy’s performance does feel lost at times.

Related: Interview with writer / director M. Night Shyamalan & Anya Taylor-Joy

It doesn’t help either that we’re dealing with a filmmaker who seems to be obsessed with the notion of a contrived cinematic twist. To a point where you can struggle to fully enjoy his movies as you spend the entire time anticipating/guessing the eventual reveal. The biggest twist in his movies would be to not have at all. We should be so lucky.

Split does come into its element, however, in the study of mental illness, using the protagonist’s delicate, volatile state of mind as a catalyst to explore tropes of the horror genre, similarly, in that regard, to what we saw recently in Lights Out and in the excellent Aussie production The Babadook. But Split is far less understated than the aforementioned endeavours, and in no way subtle in it’s depiction of mental health. But then subtlety is not really a word than Shyamalan seems to be aware of, so what did we expect?