As I hear the blood-curdling scream coming from the innocent and traumatized teenage girl, my heart starts beating faster and possibilities race through my head of what could possibly happen to her next. The psychological thriller “Split” was released on Jan. 20, with a suspense filled plot line that did an extraordinary job keeping the audience engaged throughout the length of the movie.

The premise of the movie is that main character, Kevin, suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and has 23 different personalities that can try and “take the light” at any given time. The unsettling yet sad truth that this disorder affects actual people made the whole movie all the more intense and almost saddening to watch.

Throughout most of the movie, we see Kevin’s most destructive and dangerous personality, Denis. In the first five minutes of the movie, Denis abducts three teenage girls in broad daylight. After the girls realize that he has several different personalities, they use it to their advantage and try to please and relate to each personality in hopes of finding a way out of the room they were locked in.

In addition to the unsettling plot line, there are also underlying issues and backstories with one of the abducted girls that adds to another level of tension and sadness to the movie. With such an intense plot line, there was a perfect amount of shock level and suspense in each scene. Although I was on edge of my seat anticipating what might happen next for almost the whole movie, there was enough comedic relief to make the movie more bearable.

Under director M. Night Shyamalan, the movie contained a few plot twists towards the end, making it have a great, yet unexpected finale, defying typical clichés.

James McAvoy, who performed as Kevin and all 23 of his personalities, did a phenomenal job. He put such strong emotions into every scene and executed each personality perfectly. His deliveries and accurate grasps of each personality made his performance the highlight of the movie.

One factor of the movie that didn’t really stand out or provide much depth was the score. Besides the typical eerie background instrumentals meant to keep the audience in suspense, there were hardly any songs. With a strong soundtrack, it could have improved the shock value and suspense so much more. However, they made up for what they lacked in music with other factors in the movie.

“Split” was phenomenally written and had fantastic actors making every scene more interesting than the last. Although there were a lot of unsettling details to the movie, it was an amazing production overall and I would highly recommend seeing it.

Anna Sullivan is an Entertainment Editor for The Patriot and jcpatriot.com.