Split, M. Night Shyamalan’s gripping thriller starring Anya Taylor-Joy and James McAvoy, is now available to stream for free. The film will be added to Tubi’s library starting April 1, which means that users will be able to stream for free one of the most underrated thrillers made in recent years in exchange for a few occasional ads.
Written by Shyamalan as well, Split was the director’s “big studio” response after he had been banished from Hollywood when The Last Airbender and After Earth massively failed. In 2015, he made the found-footage movie titled The Visit, a return to his roots of well-executed and unpretentious horror. After the film was a hit, he made a deal with Universal Pictures, and distanced himself from Touchstone Pictures, a.k.a. the Disney-owned studio that they used for more adult-themed movies.

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In Split, Casey, Claire and Marcia are three friends who get kidnapped by a stranger who takes them to his underground bunker. They find out rather quickly that the man has a dissociative identity condition, and each personality becomes more unpredictable than the previous one. The film’s official synopsis goes as follows:

Three girls are kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities. They must try to escape before the apparent emergence of a frightful new 24th.

The film was produced for only $9 million, a fairly low sum when compared to what Shyamalan had spent in his first movies. The Visit had cost $5 million to make, so perhaps the low budget was the key to making a well-received film. In January 2017, Split was released in theaters, and the reaction was great. It was a Shyamalan “back to basics” exercise that featured two great actors in the lead. Taylor-Joy was fresh off her success in The Witch and Morgan, and McAvoy was trying to do films outside the superhero-verse (which is ironic, considering Split is part of a franchise that loosely follows the standards of the superhero genre).
A Franchise Experiment That Didn’t End Very Well

Universal Pictures

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Split
The film has a final twist that was years in the making by M. Night Shyamalan, who trusted his guts and made Split part of something bigger. The very last scene revealed Unbreakable’s lead character, David Dunn, which meant that it took place in the same universe as the superhero-ish film starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. After Split proved to be successful, the director pursued the completion of the Unbreakable trilogy, but the result wasn’t as great as he had expected.
Glass, released in 2019 with several characters from Unbreakable and Split reprising their roles, was met with polarizing reviews. It made a good amount of money at the box office, but it felt too weak when compared to the rest of the movies in the “franchise.” McAvoy’s performance was still great, but the rest of the cast felt restricted by a poor script. Not that Shyamalan pushed for a continuation after Glass, but it was a world-building experiment that was simply uninteresting.
Source: Tubi

Split

Release Date

January 19, 2017

Runtime

117 minutes

Producers

Jason Blum, Kevin Scott Frakes, Marc Bienstock, Steven Schneider, Ashwin Rajan