“The Sixth Sense” is the movie that made its writer-director M. Night Shyamalan a cultural force, and he’s been one ever since. It’s also the movie that stereotyped him as a filmmaker whose work is dependent on plot twists. If you reading this piece about a 25-year old movie that grossed almost $700 million and has been in heavy rotation on TV ever since, you already know about the twist, and if you don’t, you should put this piece aside and watch it before reading further.
I never had that luxury, though. I made an effort not to find it out, but it appeared before me anyway, quite at random. I was in my apartment in Brooklyn, where I lived with my family at the time. We were subscribers to the print edition of Entertainment Weekly, which functionally doesn’t exist anymore. The front of the magazine had little short pieces about various aspects of entertainment. I remember there was a two-page spread full of these little pieces, and in the outermost column of the far-right hand page was one about the twist ending of “The Sixth Sense,” a horror-mystery in which Bruce Willis, funny tough-guy actor, played against type as a child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, who is treating a young man named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) who can see dead people.
I thought, “Oh, I’ll skip reading that piece and save it until I see the movie this weekend.” My wife had already seen it and loved it. We had a young daughter and would take turns going to movies by ourselves while the other stayed home.
But as I turned the page, purely by happenstance, my eye fell on the exact sentence of the exact paragraph that revealed the “twist ending.” I wasn’t angry about it, though I was a bit irritated. I told my wife what happened, and she said, “You should see it anyway; it’s a good movie.” So I went to see “The Sixth Sense” anyway and loved it so much that I went to see it a second time a week later.
I went into the movie knowing that Malcolm did not survive his shooting at the hands of a disturbed patient in the opening scene and was in fact dead throughout most of the story. This is revealed to anyone who hadn’t already figured it out in the scene where Malcolm’s wife Anna (Olivia Williams), who we thought was merely estranged from him and (at times) giving him the silent treatment, was mourning the loss of her husband. It was a treat of a different kind to hear the audience react as Anna drops the wedding ring and Malcolm tries and fails to pick it up while putting the truth together in flashback. It was as if I was seeing the film for the second time the first time.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t feel that I’d been robbed of anything because it was a substantial film with a lot more on its mind than pulling the rug out from under audiences, and many other qualities that made it worth seeing and seeing again. The performances of all the main actors were exquisite —especially Willis, Williams, and Osment. The latter gives one of the best performances by a child actor in the history of movies. Steven Spielberg cast him as the little robot boy David in “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” on the strength of his work for Shyamalan. There was more happening in the script than a delayed revelation: “The Sixth Sense” is a great movie about the psychological architecture of denial, the concept of justice, and the sad reality that many wronged people can’t get any when they’re alive.
I had a similar reaction to Shyamalan’s “The Village,” the ending of which was also inadvertently revealed to me when I heard some people in a restaurant talking about it. Knowing the ending of “The Village” didn’t hamper my appreciation of that film, either. Suffice it to say that the movie has some of the same interests as “The Sixth Sense” but goes about examining them differently, and, as in “The Sixth Sense” — and “Unbreakable” and “Signs,” the two movies he made immediately before “The Village”—the “twist” is not what you take away from the movie.
As Shyamalan’s career has progressed, he’s continued to make films dependent on big plot twists (such as “The Visit,” the low-budget smash that put him back on the map in 2015 after several years of not connecting with audiences). But he’s also made films that are not twist-dependent at all. His new film “Trap” is a cat-and-mouse thriller; stuff happens, some of it surprising, some knowingly preposterous. The works all have a particular aesthetic and set of interests that mark Shyamalan as an auteur whose work can be immediately identified as his work. He has a sixth sense for how to pull audiences in and hold them in suspense.
