M. Night Shyamalan is best known among moviegoers now as a maker of high-concept, trashy (non-derogatory) genre thrillers, but his reputation has evolved quite a lot throughout his career. For a long time, he was seen as a gimmicky filmmaker — one who relied too much on the kind of third-act, eye-opening twists that had become the biggest talking points of his earliest movies. Viewers began to see him as a one-trick pony and — due to the failures of The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth — not even a particularly good one.
In recent years, however, capably made, uncomfortably gripping films like Trap, Old, Knock at the Cabin, and Split have elevated and deepened his reputation. Now, it seems as though more viewers and critics are willing to recognize him, despite his consistent flaws as a writer, for the high-level, genre-driven visual artist and craftsman that he is. To this day, though, even Shyamalan’s biggest defenders don’t often tout him as a revolutionary or particularly forward-thinking filmmaker.
That’s somewhat surprising, considering that his breakout hit film, The Sixth Sense, set the stage for one subgenre to completely take over the horror field this decade and last. At the time of its release, all of the conversations about The Sixth Sense revolved around its shocking, undeniably brilliant central twist. Twenty-five years later, however, all it takes is one rewatch to realize that The Sixth Sense not only predicted the Elevated Horror wave of the 21st century, but that it also did deeply thematic, character-based horror storytelling better than many of the films that have since followed it.
Keep it simple and make it good
The Sixth Sense‘s plot is deceptively simple. It follows Malcolm Crowe (a spellbinding Bruce Willis), a child psychologist, as he begins to work with a new patient, Cole Sear (an effortlessly likable Haley Joel Osment), a nine-year-old boy living with his single mother, Lynn (Toni Collette). Cole eventually confides in Malcolm that he has the ability to see the ghosts of the dead people who walk secretly among the living. Malcolm, at first, doesn’t believe Cole, but a deeper look at one of his previous cases reveals to him that his young patient’s supposed gift may not be as impossible as he once believed. From there, the two begin to work together to help Cole overcome his fear of the tortured ghosts that only he can see. In doing so, Malcolm unknowingly brings himself closer to the tragic truth that has distanced him from his wife, Anna (Olivia Williams).
That truth is — spoiler alert — that Malcolm is one of the ghosts that Cole can see. He’s been dead ever since the beginning of the film, when one of his former patients, Vincent Grey (Donnie Wahlberg), broke into his and Anna’s home one night and shot Malcolm. Over the course of The Sixth Sense‘s story, Malcolm comes to realize that Vincent did have the same powers as Cole and that he failed to give his story the attention and care that it deserved. In The Sixth Sense‘s final moments, he also realizes that he didn’t survive Vincent’s break-in and that the reason his and Anna’s relationship has been so strained as of late is because she has been mourning him without him even knowing it. A quarter-century after The Sixth Sense‘s theatrical debut, the latter discovery still hits like a freight train whether you know it’s coming or not.
The movie shows off Bruce Willis’ underrated acting
This is partly due to the gentleness of Willis’ performance, which highlights the vulnerability and quiet pain that often lurked beneath his everyman persona better than almost any other he ever gave. Credit must also be given, though, to Shyamalan’s execution of the twist, and not just on the page, but on the screen. His sudden flashback to Cole’s comment that the dead people he sees don’t know they’re dead is, of course, perfectly timed.
However, Shyamalan’s best flourish remains his cut from a close-up of Willis’ concerned face over seeing Anna drop his wedding ring to a shot of Anna’s ring still on her hand, followed by a focus pull that comes when Malcolm’s ringless hand enters the foreground of the frame. It is masterful visual storytelling — one that not only brilliantly and economically keys the viewer into The Sixth Sense‘s climactic reveal, but also ties its biggest twist back to Malcolm and Anna’s marriage.
Twists don’t come at expense of story
Despite what his longtime reputation might suggest, Shyamalan doesn’t let The Sixth Sense‘s twist take precedence over its greater story. Through Malcolm and Cole, the film relentlessly and sometimes terrifyingly explores how isolating life can be. Cole’s secret literally haunts him and separates him from the rest of the world, including his mother, who he keeps the truth from out of fear that she’ll start to look at him “like everybody else.” Malcolm’s regrets over his failure with Vincent, meanwhile, plague him and prevent him from seeing the truth of his situation. At first, both characters try to deny what’s wrong with them. They keep their secrets to themselves and attempt to go on as they have. It’s only when they open up to each other about their situations that they begin to find a path toward actual progress.
Malcolm suggests that Cole offer to help the ghosts who terrorize him by finishing whatever unresolved business in life they might have left behind. When this works, Cole finally opens up to his mother in The Sixth Sense‘s penultimate scene — a discussion between he and Lynn in which he uses his conversations with the ghost of her mother to convince her of the reality of his abilities. It’s a scene that lays bare, once again, how the emotional scars that haunt us — whatever they may be — don’t have to keep us apart from everyone else. They can, instead, be what bring us closer together. “She said you came to the place where they buried her. Asked her a question? She said the answer is, ‘Every day,'” Cole remembers. “What did you ask?” Lynn tearfully replies, “Do I make her proud?,” before embracing her son.
This scene, heartbreakingly performed by Osment and Collette, also features one of The Sixth Sense‘s best jump scares when Shyamalan suddenly cuts wide to show the bloody ghost of the dead bicyclist that Cole is telling Lynn about standing emotionless right outside his car window. For this reason, Lynn and Cole’s final scene together is one of the best examples of why The Sixth Sense works as well as it does. It not only gets the human drama of its story right, but it also pulls it all off with a stylistic flair that makes it feel all the more suffocatingly atmospheric and frequently horrifying.
The movie features some of the scariest scenes that Shyamalan has ever crafted, including two in a kitchen involving the bruised visage of an abused woman, a sequence in which Cole finds himself trapped inside a cupboard with a different ghost, and a slow pan across the top of Cole’s unraveling red tent that comes down to reveal the vomiting specter of a young dead girl.
A timeless tale
The Sixth Sense is a film made by a writer-director who doesn’t feel like he needs to choose between genre thrills and emotionally authentic drama. It’s scary and it’s moving, and it nails every part of its story in a manner that very few of the so-called “elevated” or “art horror” movies of the past 10 years have been able to match. It wasn’t, by any means, the first horror film to use the genre to tell a dramatic, thematically compelling story (see also: Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now), but it was the first to do so at such a high level and in a way that was accessible to mainstream audiences.
The Sixth Sense is one of the most legendary films of one of Hollywood’s greatest ever decades, and there’s a good reason for that. It doesn’t just hold up. Twenty-five years later, it feels bracingly ahead of its time, which may just be another way of saying that The Sixth Sense is truly timeless.
The Sixth Sense is streaming now on Max.
