Split + Cape Fear

• Saturday, August 23 at 6:00pm (Split) + 9:00pm (Cape Fear) – Q&A with M. Night Shyamalan after first film
• Thursday, August 28 at 1:00pm (Split) + 3:30pm (Cape Fear)

Split
M. Night Shyamalan, 2016, U.S., 117m
Night Shyamalan made his boldest creative swerve in years with this unnervingly controlled blend of psychological thriller, gallows humor, and pulp horror. Three teenage girls are abducted by Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a man with dissociative identity disorder whose “Horde” of 23 personalities—including the superhuman Beast—begin to surface. As one captive (Anya Taylor-Joy) plots escape, Kevin’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley) struggles to understand the danger gathering beneath his fractured mind. What could have played as pure exploitation is elevated by tight pacing, Hitchcockian craft, and McAvoy’s explosively virtuosic performance(s) to channel thorny ideas about trauma and fractured identity. A box-office hit and critical turning point for Shyamalan, Split is both a sly callback to Unbreakable and a bold reframe that “twists” the cinematic universe concept with the director’s characteristic sleight of hand.

Followed by:

Cape Fear
Martin Scorsese, 1991, U.S., 35mm, 128m
Martin Scorsese’s feverish remake of the 1962 thriller reimagines a pulp tale of vengeance as a heightened psychological opera of guilt, class, and moral ambiguity. Robert De Niro is ferociously theatrical as Max Cady, a tattooed ex-convict and self-styled Biblical avenger who returns to torment the lawyer Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) who once buried evidence that might have acquitted him. As Cady methodically dismantles the family’s sense of security, Scorsese leans into Hitchcockian stylization and noir expressionism—storm-lashed skies, unhinged camera angles, and a vicious sense of humor. Closing out this double bill of charismatic predators shaped by deep-seated horrors, Cape Fear probes, with unrelenting energy, the uneasy space between justice and revenge, protector and threat. Its own sly twist casts Robert Mitchum—the original Cady—as the elderly, honorable police lieutenant Elgart, and Gregory Peck, 1962’s Bowden, as Cady’s defense attorney.