It is impossible to discuss The Sixth Sense without discussing the twist. Try watching the movie now, I dare you to focus on anything else. I just could not. I found myself following Bruce Willis in every scene, watching the trick play out. Plenty of movies from this era were wound up in a great twist ending: Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, Memento, etc. The Sixth Sense’s twist is the hardest to ignore. There are few shots, few scenes, that do not depend entirely on the sleight of hand director M. Night Shyamalan is playing.
So, let’s get it out of the way, because you know the twist by now. Here’s your last chance to turn away from SPOILERS with the most famous twist in movie history other than Darth Vader being Luke’s dad: (SPOILERS AGAIN) Bruce Willis is dead. He’s a ghost the entire time.
Boom! You got us, M. Night.
Well, played, you clever bastard.
The twist at work is brilliantly
executed. We repeatedly see Bruce Willis’s Dr. Malcolm Crowe in scenes with
other characters. You just never notice that he’s not interacting with the adults.
Sometimes the movie just outright fools us. Malcolm’s wife Anna (Olivia Williams)
says “happy anniversary” in his direction, but ignores everything else he has
been saying. One scene gives us the implication that Malcolm was mid-conversation with
Toni Collette’s Lynn Sheer, the mother of Cole (Haley Joel Osment). They're sitting directly
across from each other when the shot opens, so we imagine an interaction that has not happened.
However, I don’t think The Sixth Sense needed this twist. Don't get me wrong, I love it. It's genius. But I have issues with it. This is not a movie
building to a great twist, it’s a great movie with a twist in it. And I’d
argue, the ending actually becomes something of a distraction. Upon this
rewatch, I was too busy following the mechanics of the movie to just watch the
movie. “What is Shyamalan hiding up his sleeve in this scene?”, I wondered.
That left me ignoring the more successful drama being played out.
The Sixth Sense is about
this little boy, Cole, who is bullied and isolated from the world. A child-psychiatrist,
Dr. Crowe, has been hired by his mother to help the boy out. (Or so we believe. There is no actual explanation as to how Malcolm got on this case.)
Slowly, Malcolm is able to break through the boy’s boundaries and discover what
is really troubling him: the undead. Ghosts are all over Philadelphia, and
they all want attention from Cole. Sometimes that attention is terrifying. The Sixth Sense has some real banger scares with a dead boy and puking girl. Those shots are still scary twenty years later.
However, Cole discovers that as scary as the dead are, they’re still just people. People who need help. Together with Dr. Malcolm, Cole is eventually able to accept his gift. He can be something of a hero, right terrible wrongs for spirits with no voice. He can even open up to his mother and admit what is really going on.
This is a
running theme with Shyamalan: exceptional people overcoming the world’s
judgement to do great things. He accomplishes it far more successfully in
Unbreakable, which is his best movie. Sometimes this anti-institutional theme makes his movies really problematic. Glass is almost an Ayn Rand fantasy of individualism. Old decided to take on the pharmaceutical industry in the absolute worst possible year. Nobody else is making movies like Shyamalan, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
The Sixth Sense is a spectacular drama with great acting everywhere. Donnie Wahlberg and Greg Wood only get one scene each, and they both are amazing. Haley Joel Osment is the best actor in
the movie, which is shocking considering how tiny he is. He was only about ten
when this movie was made, and the way shots are staged make him look even
younger. He’s a helpless little lamb compared to the massive monumental scale
of the buildings around him. Cole still calls his mom "Mama". Toni Collette and Osment’s final scene together is
an absolute tear-jerker, settling all the drama the movie has built up in an
overture of love and acceptance.
But then the last scene has to be about Malcolm and the big twist pay-off. I wish The Sixth Sense was remembered more as a great drama and less this twist movie. I why this was done. The ghost reveal
isn’t lacking sympathy and emotion. But it is gimmicky. I would rather people
walk away from this movie with hearts pull of positivity and wonder, not
applauding as the magician pulls the ghost of Bruce Willis out of a hat.
M. Night Shyamalan has had a roller coaster of a career. He
reached the highest of highs early on, being prematurely hailed as “the new
Hitchcock”. Ten years later, his stock had turned completely toxic. I think the problem were the twists. Eventually his movies became juggling acts of six or seven ideas all to wow the audience with final
reveals. Signs and The Village suffer badly for that. Or Shyamalan just got up
his own ass with movies like Lady in the Water, an atrocious ego trip. He’s
mostly recovered over the last ten years with a string of solid movies. Old's final twist is awful, but I liked that movie.
Shyamalan is one of our most talented directors. His eye for staging shots and building tension is masterful. He can pull beautiful human moments out of ghost stories or Superman movies or alien invasions. Unfortunately, over his career, he hasn't re-found the humanity on display in The Sixth Sense again. I won’t take anything away from him – The Sixth Sense is easily the best movie we’ve covered so far. It’s damn good. But it also makes you wish he had more movies like this.
Next time we travel to the NEW MILLENNIUM, the year 2000!!!! That's the year X-Men launched two decades of Marvel movie dominance, the Supreme Court doomed millions of people to horrible deaths by making George W. Bush president, and our next movie, The Cell.
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