Shyamalan puts together a great thriller. The central character of Kevin is compelling both as an acting performance from McAvoy and as a thematic parallel to Taylor-Joy's Casey. The nature of belief and its power are made very physical and literal in this story. There's a recurring idea about the significance of one's interior self and potential, which can be misunderstood or concealed by layers of personality or social performance.

Something curious here to me is how much of the film seems to operate through the language of familiar horror tropes, but doesn't necessarily embrace them fully. In a lot of ways the movie itself is structured to play off audience judgments and expectations in a playful way. It's a big performance itself, hiding depth under its own layers of familiar genre conventions. The characters aside from Kevin are a mixture of leaning towards cliches but not owning them entirely. It was enough to make me wonder at times where things would ultimately develop.

Even though just about every character's part in this story resolves in an expected way by the end, the path of getting there twists enough that it feels meant to challenge the audience's temptation to stereotype. After all, stereotyping characters and assuming the plot is like sleepwalking through a story. Can you really understand something new if you're so eager to use an old schema to define it? The character of Dr. Fletcher illustrates this question/problem well.

"You've always been asleep. You never had a chance." (Split, 2016) (cf.) "Real life doesn't fit into the little boxes that were drawn for it." (Unbreakable, 2000)