Split (PG-13)
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This movie, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, came out in 2017, but I didn't see it until 2023. In the final scene, it ties into a movie that came out about 16 years earlier (as well as a sequel, which came out in 2019), and I'm going to link to those movies at the bottom of my review. This constitutes a spoiler, so if you don't want to know what movies I'm talking about, you may not want to read this review.

A teenage girl named Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) attends a birthday party for one of her classmates, but keeps to herself the whole time. When her ride doesn't show up to pick her up after the party, the father of one of her classmates, Claire (who may have been the birthday girl, I forget) offers to drive her home, along with Claire and her friend Marcia. Soon after the three girls get into the car, a man named Dennis (James McAvoy) renders Claire's father unconscious and gets into the driver's seat himself, kidnapping the girls. In the course of their captivity, it becomes apparent that Dennis has multiple personalities (dissociative identity disorder). The real one is Kevin, of whom we see very little. Kevin has 23 personalities, most of whom we never see at all. There's another one named Patricia, who is working with Dennis, while the others remain neutral to the situation. The personality we see the most of besides Dennis is a 9-year-old boy named Hedwig, whom Casey tries to befriend to get him to help her and the other girls. Meanwhile, we occasionally see Kevin's therapist, Dr. Karen Fletcher, who at first thinks she's talking with another of his personalities named Barry, but she eventually realizes Dennis was merely pretending to be Barry, to cover for the fact that Barry had sent Dr. Fletcher an alarming e-mail. Dennis talks about a potential 24th personality called "the Beast", who is going to show up eventually, and who has superhuman abilities (and cannibalistic tendencies). Dr. Fletcher doesn't believe in the Beast, despite treating Kevin's other personalities as real, and believing that people with DID can have amazing physical developments such as blind people regaining eyesight, because "we are what we believe we are". Unfortunately, the Beast does turn out to be real, and just as Dennis described him. Also, throughout the movie we see flashbacks to when Casey was a young girl, and was abused by her uncle, who eventually gained custody of her after her father died.

I don't want to spoil many more details of the plot, but I will say it's a fairly interesting movie. I do have mixed feelings about it, though, mainly because of how it depicts mental illness. While I find the possibilities talked about in the movie intriguing as a fictional plot device, they are of course unrealistic. And many people have quite rightly criticized the moving for stigmatizing and grossly misrepresenting mental health disorders. I'm a bit more able than some to overlook that (though I expect most people who watch the movie will completely overlook that, and not even care about it). I don't really think the intriguing nature of the concept in the movie really justifies this misrepresentation, and I do care, but... I can live with it. Another problem I have with the movie is that Casey having survived abuse seems to be what saves her, in the end, and I really don't like the idea of that abuse being presented as if it had a beneficial outcome. Still, if not for these two flaws, I might have rated the movie slightly higher than I did.