The Sixth Sense

Welcome back to “Halloween Month.” For this year, I will look at films that were directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a directed that I feel peaked too early with his sudden twists at the ending. Let’s get started with the first film he directed, “The Sixth Sense,” released in 1999.

This isn’t a thriller in the modern sense, but more of a ghost story of the type that succeeded a long time ago, when ordinary people glimpsed hidden dimensions. Roger Ebert said in his review, “It has long been believed that children are better than adults at seeing ghosts; the barriers of skepticism and disbelief are not yet in place.” In this film, a small boy seriously tells his psychologist, “I see dead people. They want me to do things for them.” He appears to be right.

The psychologist is Malcolm Crowe, played by Bruce Willis, who is shot one night in his home by a burglar, a man who had been his patient years earlier and believes he was falsely diagnosed. The man then turns the gun on himself. “The next fall,” as the caption informs, we see Crowe has recovered but probably not in spirit, as he takes on a new patient, a boy named Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment, who shows some of the same problems as the patient who shot at Crowe. Maybe this time he can get it right.

The film shows us things adults do not see. When Cole’s mother, played by Toni Collette, leaves the kitchen for just a second and comes back in the room, every door and drawer is open. At school, he tells his teacher “They used to hang people here.” When the teacher thinks how Cole could possibly know things like that, he reassures her, “When you were a boy, they called you Stuttering Stanley.” It is Crowe’s job to speak to this boy and help him if helping is what he actually needs. Maybe he is calling for help. He knows how to say “From out of the depths I cry into you, oh Lord!” in Latin. Crowe doesn’t really believe the boy’s stories, but Crowe himself is suffering, partly because his wife, once so close, now appears to be having an affair and doesn’t appear to hear him when he talks to her. The boy tells him, “Talk to her when she’s asleep. That’s when she’ll hear you.” Using an “as if” approach in therapy, Crowe asks Cole, “What do you think the dead people are trying to tell you?” Ebert mentions, “This is an excellent question, seldom asked in ghost stories, where the heroes are usually so egocentric they think the ghosts have gone to all the trouble of appearing simply so they can see them. Cole has some ideas. Crowe wonders whether the ideas aren't sound even if there aren't really ghosts.”

Bruce Willis often sees himself in fantasies and science fiction films. Ebert answers, “Perhaps he fits easily into them because he is so down to earth. He rarely seems ridiculous, even when everything else in the screen is absurd (see "Armageddon"), because he never over-reaches; he usually plays his characters flat and matter of fact. Here there is a poignancy in his bewilderment.” The film opens with the mayor giving him a citation, and that moment marks the beginning of his professional decline. He goes down with a type of doomed dignity.

Haley Joel Osment, his child co-star, is a very good actor in a film where his character possibly has more lines than anyone else. He’s in most of the scenes, and he has to act in them – this isn’t a role for a cute kid who can stand there and look solemn in reaction shots. There are fairly involved dialogue moments between Willis and Osment that require good timing, reactions, and the ability to listen. Ebert noted, “Osment is more than equal to them. And although the tendency is to notice how good he is, not every adult actor can play heavy dramatic scenes with a kid and not seem to condescend (or, even worse, to be subtly coaching and leading him). Willis can. Those scenes give the movie its weight and make it as convincing as, under the circumstances, it can possibly be.”

I’m with Ebert when he said, “I have to admit I was blind-sided by the ending. The solution to many of the film's puzzlements is right there in plain view, and the movie hasn't cheated, but the very boldness of the storytelling carried me right past the crucial hints and right through to the end of the film, where everything takes on an intriguing new dimension.” The film was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, whose previous film, “Wide Awake,” was also about a little boy with a supernatural ability. He mourned his dead grandfather and demanded an explanation from God. Ebert admitted, “I didn't think that one worked.” “The Sixth Sense” has a type of calm, sneaky self-confidence that allows it to take us down a strange path, enchantingly.

I think everyone probably knows the twist ending in this, but if you don’t, then you should see the movie because I cannot spoil it for you. As the first Shyamalan film, this took everyone by surprise and everyone loved it. When you see it, you will know and love it too. When my brother saw it, I remember him walking up to us exclaiming how shocked he was with how the film ended. My sister had spoiled the ending for me, but not in grave detail. What’s funny is that my brother asked me once if I saw him covered in blood or with any wound marks, and I told him no. My sister let me know that he was still in shock about the film. When I saw it as an adult, I really enjoyed it.

Interesting fact: Bruce Willis learned to write with his right hand in this movie, and he is left-handed. See this film if you haven’t because you will really like it and will thoroughly find yourself invested in the film the more you watch it.

Stay tuned next Monday when I talk about the next film that people are split on, but I liked it when I saw it in “M. Night Shyamalan Month.”