M. Night Shyamalan Gets Back to His Twisty Thriller Ways in 'Split' Trailer

M. Night Shyamalan may not be, as Newsweek once famously dubbed him, “The Next Spielberg.” But after a couple of serious misfires (The Village, Lady in the Water), followed by two for-hire studio duds (The Last Airbender, After Earth), the director seemed to right his career with last year’s surprisingly sturdy found-footage horror film The Visit. Now, for the follow-up to that modest hit (which again pairs him with horror producer Jason Blum), the director is back with a high-profile release starring James McAvoy. And as suggested by its debut trailer, it may be a true return to his The Sixth Sense form.

Split concerns three young women (The Witch’s Anya Taylor-Joy, Jessica Sula and Haley Lu Richardson) who are abducted from a parking lot by McAvoy’s Kevin, who promptly locks them up in a subterranean room, where flowers (on their beds, in their bathroom) suggest that the captives are oh-so-very important to their captor. If that situation weren’t creepy enough for the trio, however, they soon discover that Kevin isn’t just Kevin — he has dissociative personality disorder and embodies 23 distinct identities, including a malevolent one known only as “The Beast” who, from the looks of things, may actually be a legitimate werewolf-style monster.

Written for the screen as well as directed by Shyamalan, Split looks like it’ll have more than a few surprises and third-act twists in store for audiences when it creeps its way into theaters on Jan. 20.