What good is a plot twist if you know it’s coming? (Spoilers ahead)
The Sixth Sense (1999), directed by the young M. Night Shyamalan (about 28 at the time), is perhaps one of the most famous films in recent history, grossing 672.8 million dollars and placing it seventh on the highest grossing films of the 90s. The premise is a familiar supernatural trope: A psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, (Bruce Willis) helps deal with an eight-year old boy, Cole Sear, (Haley Joel Osmet) who thinks he can see ghosts.
Of course, the psychologist does not believe him at first. You can’t make the reveal that easy. M. Night must fill up a whole second act, building conflict and tension further by figures in the corner of the eye and noises in bathrooms at night. Crowe then starts to doubt himself, with Willis behind the wheel at his absolute worst. Opening his mouth wide in an O-shape, eyes widening… maybe there are ghosts??? Of course the eight-year old boy is right, you didn’t even need a reveal for this. I’ve never seen a single movie where a parent proves a child wrong. It’s somehow always the child who’s the moral compass and the one who challenges authorities with his/her innocent mind. Oh, and the smaller and cuter they look, the better chance they have of being right.
So I wonder how the boy proves himself? It doesn’t take much thinking to finally realize M. Night has been setting up this plot twist for so long; that the psychologist is in fact the dead one. Now it makes sense why his wife was never talking to him! Genius.
The film is, of course, far from genius. The more you think about its faulty plot, the more you ask yourself how people still fall for this. Some even go as far as saying they were scared by the film. The fact that this actually scared people scares me more than the actual film. I was thoroughly bored, but managed to entertain myself by laughing at Willis’ stupidity and M. Night’s ego translating through every cliché. The cinematography is not even close to “atmospheric” (as some people say(???)); unless the objective was to make The Sixth Sense look like an indie film produced on a four million dollar budget.
But it is possible the film has one redeeming factor. Haley Joel Osmet’s performance is generally universally acclaimed, often considered the greatest child performance of the 90s. I’m not so sure it’s so great-- I would personally give the title to Natalie Portman in Leon: the Professional (1994)— but Osment certainly displays a keen sense of knowing when and how to carry a catastrophe of a screenplay to life.
I don’t really know what genre to classify The Sixth Sense as. It’s not really horror, because it has to be at least somewhat scary. It’s not really mystery, because it has to be hiding something from us, and we have to want to know what happens. It’s definitely not thriller, which is a tag entirely inappropriate for such an atrocity. Perhaps comedy then? I sure as hell think it’s a great joke.
D
The Sixth Sense (1999), directed by the young M. Night Shyamalan (about 28 at the time), is perhaps one of the most famous films in recent history, grossing 672.8 million dollars and placing it seventh on the highest grossing films of the 90s. The premise is a familiar supernatural trope: A psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, (Bruce Willis) helps deal with an eight-year old boy, Cole Sear, (Haley Joel Osmet) who thinks he can see ghosts.
Of course, the psychologist does not believe him at first. You can’t make the reveal that easy. M. Night must fill up a whole second act, building conflict and tension further by figures in the corner of the eye and noises in bathrooms at night. Crowe then starts to doubt himself, with Willis behind the wheel at his absolute worst. Opening his mouth wide in an O-shape, eyes widening… maybe there are ghosts??? Of course the eight-year old boy is right, you didn’t even need a reveal for this. I’ve never seen a single movie where a parent proves a child wrong. It’s somehow always the child who’s the moral compass and the one who challenges authorities with his/her innocent mind. Oh, and the smaller and cuter they look, the better chance they have of being right.
So I wonder how the boy proves himself? It doesn’t take much thinking to finally realize M. Night has been setting up this plot twist for so long; that the psychologist is in fact the dead one. Now it makes sense why his wife was never talking to him! Genius.
The film is, of course, far from genius. The more you think about its faulty plot, the more you ask yourself how people still fall for this. Some even go as far as saying they were scared by the film. The fact that this actually scared people scares me more than the actual film. I was thoroughly bored, but managed to entertain myself by laughing at Willis’ stupidity and M. Night’s ego translating through every cliché. The cinematography is not even close to “atmospheric” (as some people say(???)); unless the objective was to make The Sixth Sense look like an indie film produced on a four million dollar budget.
But it is possible the film has one redeeming factor. Haley Joel Osmet’s performance is generally universally acclaimed, often considered the greatest child performance of the 90s. I’m not so sure it’s so great-- I would personally give the title to Natalie Portman in Leon: the Professional (1994)— but Osment certainly displays a keen sense of knowing when and how to carry a catastrophe of a screenplay to life.
I don’t really know what genre to classify The Sixth Sense as. It’s not really horror, because it has to be at least somewhat scary. It’s not really mystery, because it has to be hiding something from us, and we have to want to know what happens. It’s definitely not thriller, which is a tag entirely inappropriate for such an atrocity. Perhaps comedy then? I sure as hell think it’s a great joke.
D