Film

Split

Split is Shyamalan's clammy, claustrophobic thriller: James McAvoy cycling through a killer's twenty-three personalities while three abducted girls try to work out which one might let them live. It's less about gore than dread — small rooms, shifting voices, a monster built from psychology rather than makeup. Anya Taylor-Joy is the ballast. Good for horror fans who prefer unease to jump scares, and for anyone curious about the trilogy's sly final twist.

TMDb rating7.3

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Unbreakable2000

Shyamalan's own foundation for Split — a quiet, melancholic superhero origin story years before the genre got loud, and the film that makes Split's final scene land like a gut-punch.

But It's slow and serious where Split is jumpy — no captivity thriller tension, just brooding origin-story pacing.

Unbreakable poster

Glass2019

The trilogy's closer, bringing McAvoy's Kevin back opposite Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson for a strange, talky showdown about whether comic-book myths are real.

But Divisive even among fans — more therapy session than action climax, and it can't quite match Split's tension.

Glass poster

The Sixth Sense1999

Shyamalan at his most controlled, proof he was pulling off devastating twists long before Split — patient, sad, and genuinely rewatchable once you know the secret.

But Everyone already knows the twist, which strips out the one thing that made it a phenomenon.

The Sixth Sense poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Sybil1976

Sally Field's performance is the real-world blueprint for what McAvoy is doing — a genuine clinical account of dissociative identity disorder that Split turns into a monster movie.

The film that put multiple personality disorder into pop culture decades before Split, treating Sybil's sixteen personalities as a wound to be understood rather than a threat to be escaped.

But It's a three-hour TV movie from 1976 — slow, stagey, and grounded in trauma rather than thrills.

Sybil poster
More like this (8)

Identity2003

A stranded-motel slasher that quietly turns into a multiple-personality puzzle box, with a structure that ends up rhyming with Split's late-film reveal almost scene for scene.

But The mechanics are cleverer than the characters, and the twist has aged into a well-known spoiler.

Identity poster

Room2015

A captivity story told entirely from the point of view of the person trapped, with Brie Larson's raw performance doing what Casey's backstory only gestures at in Split.

But It's a drama, not a thriller — no monster, no scares, just grief and endurance.

Room poster

10 Cloverfield Lane2016

Another young woman waking up in a stranger's underground bunker, trying to read a captor whose motives keep shifting — same claustrophobic dread, different genre engine.

But The third-act swerve is a bigger genre lurch than anything in Split, and not everyone's on board with it.

10 Cloverfield Lane poster

The Visit2015no page yet

Shyamalan's scrappy found-footage horror-comedy, cheaper and weirder than Split but built on the same instinct for turning ordinary domestic spaces into something genuinely wrong.

But It's scrappier and sillier — found footage clunk and broad comedy where Split stays committed to dread.

Orphan2009

A twist-driven horror thriller that plays the long con on who the real threat is, with the same pleasure in slowly reassembling what you thought you knew.

But The twist is now widely spoiled online, and the film leans hard on shock value.

Orphan poster

Prisoners2013

A grim, meticulous abduction thriller that trades Split's supernatural edge for procedural dread — what happens to the people left looking, not just the ones taken.

But It's a slow, heavy two-and-a-half hours with no genre payoff at all — pure bleak realism.

Prisoners poster

United States of Tara2009

Same condition, opposite lens: a comic-dramatic series told from inside a woman with DID and her family, instead of from the terrified people trying to survive her.

A funny, tender Showtime series about a suburban mother whose alters take over at inconvenient times — warm and messy where Split is airless and threatening.

But It's a sitcom-adjacent dramedy, not a thriller — there's no dread here, and the tonal whiplash isn't for everyone.

United States of Tara poster

Me, Myself & Irene2000no page yet

The exact same premise — a mild man with a second, dangerous personality — run through the Farrelly Brothers' gross-out comedy machine instead of Shyamalan's horror one.

Jim Carrey plays sweet and psychotic in the same body for laughs, a reminder that Kevin's condition is one costume-change away from slapstick rather than horror.

But It's crude, dated, and occasionally mean-spirited about mental illness in ways that haven't aged gracefully.

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