Split follows Shyamalan’s clever little horror The Visit (2014), a film that delivered a chilling Shyamalan twist and plenty of dark comedy to sink your teeth into. However, does Split live up to its hype and will Shyamalan ever recapture the magic of his Sixth Sense glory days? Split begins with the sudden, somewhat frightening abduction of three teenage girls by a man we come to know as Dennis. We find out that Dennis likes to watch young women dance. Dennis is beyond creepy.

But Dennis is not alone. In fact, Dennis shares the body of Kevin Wendell Crumb (is that the best name Shyamalan could come up with?) alongside twenty-three different personalities, all screaming to get out. However, there’s actually a 24th personality that has never reared its ugly head: the Beast. This personality is superhuman and, as promised by nine-year-old Hedwig in the trailer, “has done bad things and will do bad things to you”. Most of the action comes from the heroine of the film, Casey, played by Ana Major Turner who stunned in The Witch, in her fight to escape the labyrinth apartment she’s locked in.

The most exciting, truly mesmerising aspect of Split is James McAvoy. His performance in this film is a career-defining moment. What he does in Split is rarely seen in cinema. Tom Hardy and Jake Gyllenhaal are a select few who have played two parts in one feature, but five characters is almost unheard of. McAvoy slides from an effeminate, Boston fashion designer to a frightening old lady through a simple, imperceptible eye movement, akin to Antony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. Split is an acting masterclass to any budding thespian. Ana Major Joy equally shines, striking the balance between a quiet melancholy and violent fearlessness. The scenes between Hedwig and Casey are the most emotionally wrought, enthralling and even comedic of the film, breathing life back into Split when the momentum lags.

But ultimately, this is simply not enough to make Split a convincingly good horror film. Shyamalan relies on exhausted tropes and the odd jump scare to try to create horror, but often falls flat.

The problematic convention of one girl being more worthy of life than her sidekick scream queens—who are given contrived dialogue, and deserve to die because they like their iPhones —has no place in modern horror. The beyond troubling representation of DID (dissociative identity disorder) further begs the question of Split’s ethics, or lack thereof. And besides all of this, the truth is that Split is just not that scary.

Speaking more generally, the film never quite picks up the momentum promised by the trailers. Tension is often drained with mundane and irrelevant scenes of exposition from Kevin’s therapist, treating the audience like students in a lecture theatre—can we ever escape?

This contributes to a stagnating pace that runs out of steam by the third act. Oh, and of course there’s the Shyamalan twist. Unfortunately, it is so conceited that it is created for an exclusive select few. Indeed, the twist is smart and re-frames everything, but could mislead audiences all the way back to The Sixth Sense (1999), further muddling an already messy film. Spoiler alert: watch Unbreakable (2002) first.

This film proves Shyamalan has a long way to go to re-realise his full potential as a screenwriter and director, however I’d still recommend giving it a watch purely for the thrill of watching McAvoy at the very top of his game.

Thanks to the arbitrary malice of the Oxford admin office and the Gregorian calendar, Valentine’s day this year falls in the middle of Fifth Week, and you know what that means—a double whammy of fifth week and singleton blues. So, to cheer you up, Cherwell has compiled the official film guide to curing your blues via the box:

Single? This film will make you glad you are. Gone Girl, David Fletcher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 thriller, would surely win any prize going for the worst film to watch on a first date. Centred on the disappearance of Amy (Rosamund Pike), all signs seem to point at shifty husband Nick (Ben Affleck) as the source of her disappearance, but as the police investigation gets underway it becomes clear that something is amiss. If you want to watch the picking apart of a dysfunctional marriage to hammer home that all relationships are secretly fuelled by hatred anyway, Gone Girl will bring some validation to your sorrow.

For a more realistic portrayal of the perils of modern dating, you can’t go wrong with 500 Days of Summer. Zooey Deschanel plays the titular Summer, a prototypical manic pixie dream girl constructed by Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and the film plays out the gradual failure of their relationship over the course of a year and a half. It may not be cheerful but at least it’s realistic, and it is certainly pleasing to see a film that deconstructs its own tropes—the recognition of Tom’s naïve perception of women is made manifest in the cathartic ending, in which Tom meets a girl named Autumn, proving that Summer was, to him, a phase and not a person in her own right. So, if you’re experiencing something of a winter of discontent, 500 Days of Summer could be just the one for you.

Too scared of commitment to commit to an entire film? Try an episode of Lovesick to cure your heartache. Originally billed as Scrotal Recall, Lovesick follows Dylan, a 20-something recently diagnosed with chlamydia who is tasked with telling all his ex-partners about his diagnosis. Every episode is centred on a different ex-girlfriend as the show continually jumps back and forth in time. Perfect for dipping in and out of. Cheeky.

Sometimes we all need to have a good old fashioned cry, and especially since it’s Fifth Week, perfect crying material comes to us in the hands of Disney’s Up. Unless you’re really into cartoons about old people exploring the rainforest, watching the entire film won’t be necessary. Just opt for the first ten minutes and the sequence in which Carl and Ellie’s marriage is summarised, to remind you that love is fleeting and ephemeral at the best of times— and if a pixelated old man can’t be lucky in love, what does it matter if that girl from Bridge the other night didn’t text you back?

Need a total and utter distraction from anything vaguely work/romance related? Let childhood classic Finding Nemo distract you with its rather ominous tale of a fish being kidnapped. It may not be high culture, but it does have some valuable life lessons for us all, so when in doubt, remember—“just keep swimming.”