M. Night Shyamalan has been on a roll for quite a while now. Since he abandoned blockbusters, which can undoubtedly be counted among the worst of his career, and returned to low budgets with ‘La visita’, he has not stopped giving us joy: he has signed ‘Time‘, ‘There is a knock on the door’ or ‘Servant‘ In addition to completing the superheroic trilogy that started at the beginning of his career with ‘The Protected’. This concluded with ‘Glass’, but before he introduced us to the villain of the story in this ‘Multiple‘, which just landed in Netflix (can also be seen on Prime Video, Movistar Plus+ and SkyShowtime).
‘Multiple’ account the story of a psychopath with 23 different personalities, though one is destined to emerge, determined to dominate all the others. In the process of his falling into the most schizoid abysses, this young man kidnaps three teenage girls whom he will keep in a cellar. Only when their multiple personalities come into conflict, will the young women, led by Anya Taylor-Joy who was beginning to stand out in the cinema after ‘The Witch’, be able to try to escape.
The curious thing about this magnificent horror and suspense film is that it is based on a real case: Billy Milligan, born in 1955 and died in 2014, convicted of three rapes, was the first person to use his status as a personality victim in his trial multiple. Milligan had 24 personalities, divided into 10 likeables (Milligan himself, Arthur, Ragen Vadascovinich, Allen, Tommy, Danny, David, Christene, Christopher, and Adalana) and 13 unlikeables (Phil, Kevin, Walter, April, Samuel, Mark, Steve , Lee, Jason, Bobby, Shawn, Martin and Timothy). An additional one, The Professor, was a fusion of all of them.
However, in the film, the magnificent performance of James McAvoy endows the murderer with more extreme characteristics: each of their personalities has a different body chemistry (there is one, for example, who is diabetic), none of them remember what they are doing the other personalities and there is a monstrous and cannibalistic one, The Beast, who has superhuman characteristics. This allows Shyamalan to take the film into superheroic realm, where he will enter his celebrated post-credits sequence and the third installment of the trilogy. But until then, ‘Multiple’ works as an excellent piece of claustrophobic horror.
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