The Real Spoiler in M. Night Shyamalan's "Split"

It's easy to mistake a movie's popularity for an artistic phenomenon rather than a sociological one. M. Night Shyamalan's "Split" is the latter. It has a scene early on, centered on a car, that suggests at least an effort at playful inventiveness. The rest of the film is the work of a puppet master who works with an admirable but unoriginal industrial efficiency, retrofitting characters and their lives to fit the mechanical dictates of a simplistic scare story. Yet it's a hit, and there are good...