25 years later, a classic thriller with an iconic twist just got a major update

Some directors achieve fame gradually, building recognition film by film, accumulating bankable status over time. Others hit like lightning, a big movie making them a household name practically overnight.

M. Night Shyamalan falls into the latter category. The Philadelphia filmmaker owes his career and reputation as an author to The sixth senseand particularly in the film’s third-act reveal, a bold plot twist that has entered the cultural consciousness in a way that few plot twists have. (If, by some miracle, you don’t know what the twist is, this is your warning not to read any further.) As the film gets a new 4K Blu-ray release this month, and as Shyamalan seems to be in mode full comeback with the success of his concert thriller trap — It is the right time to review your success.

Although Shyamalan had already made two little-seen films before The sixth sense Hitting theaters in the summer of 1999, the ghost story/thriller hybrid launched his career beyond his wildest dreams. Centered around the relationship between a veteran child psychologist, Malcolm (Bruce Willis), and his new patient, a precocious boy named Cole who has the ability to see and communicate with ghosts (Haley Joel Osment), the film The film became the second highest grossing film. 1999 film and an almost instant classic, establishing Shyamalan as the pre-eminent supernatural filmmaker of his generation.

What was it about this peculiar film that made it feel so cultural? Definitely Shyamalan’s fusion of macabre elements with troubled family drama and a touch of ghost-romanticism proved powerful. And Osment gives one of the best child performances of the 90s, embodying the haunted, hyperaware Cole with a magnetic sensibility. Not just any child actor could have turned “I see dead people” into one of the most instantly recognizable movie quotes of the late 20th century. (Surprisingly, that moment doesn’t come until 50 minutes in, a whole world of character building and setting before the film reveals Cole’s condition and his own supernatural stakes.)

The macabre fun of The sixth sense comes from the ever-changing variety of ghosts Cole encounters: some friendly, some not, most showing some gory meaning to their death. There’s the boy with the open head wound, offering Cole “where does my dad keep his gun,” the housewife who slashes his wrist and the hanging victims at school, and the grandmother herself Cole, sharing messages for his mother. There’s a carnivalesque unpredictability to the film’s inventive scares.

There’s also Kyra (a very young Mischa Barton), a ghost girl poisoned by her own mother in a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In a curious and dramatic interlude, which becomes a turning point in the film, Cole visits Kyra’s funeral reception and presents her father with video evidence of her murder, thus saving his sister from the same luck

The sequence offers a glimpse of a different, more sinister direction the film could have gone in which Cole goes around helping ghosts bring their killers to justice. Indeed, as explained in Brian Raftery’s book the best movie year neveran early version of the script, which Shyamalan described as “a rip-off The silence of the lambs”, centered around a crime scene photographer and his son who has the ability to see victims of serial killers. Shyamalan wisely abandoned this approach.

However, Kyra’s sequence helps Cole realize that he can help the ghosts that haunt him instead of fearing them. Of course, that includes Malcolm himself, a benevolent ghost, though he doesn’t know it yet, and neither does the audience, though the clues are all there. (The film opens with Malcolm shot down by a troubled former patient, who is later revealed to have the same condition as Cole, misdiagnosed by Malcolm. Later, Cole tells Malcolm that he sees dead people and that “they don’t know they’re dead,” as the camera pans to Malcolm’s worried face.) Only with Cole’s guidance is Malcolm able to say goodbye to his grieving wife and move on to a kind of afterlife.

Shyamalan, never a subtle filmmaker, can’t help but give the viewer the big twist with a flurry of emotional music waves and flashbacks, revisiting key moments with new insights like a Malcolm practically stunned. stumbles in shock. It’s the kind of ending that’s designed to make sure everyone in the house understands exactly what’s being revealed.

Still, it’s a clever twist, especially since it spins The sixth sense in a kind of cinematic paraprosdokian, a joke in which the last part of the sentence changes the meaning of the first. The film’s big reveal changes the meaning of everything that has gone before. Malcolm isn’t dealing with marital problems and a distant wife who won’t speak to him; he is dead! She’s not ignoring him at the birthday dinner; she is grieving for herself. He moves through the world of the living like a ghost because he is one. What Malcolm (and, by extension, the viewer) perceives as frozen silence is actually oblivion.

Shyamalan’s trick is so audacious that it seems obvious upon re-watching. After the opening scene, Cole is the only character who has an actual conversation with Malcolm. In the scenes where the others seem to interact with Malcolm, they are actually alone. The cleverest example is the scene where Cole comes home from school to find his mother (Toni Collette) and Malcolm sitting across from each other in the living room. The opening shot implies that they’ve been talking about him, but looking back, you realize that no words are ever exchanged between them.

Are there any holes here? for sure Are we to believe that Malcolm went months without realizing that no one seemed to hear anything he said? Didn’t he hear his wife talking about him in the past tense? And how come he’s not bloody and visibly injured like all the other ghosts Cole sees? (Alternatively, Shyamalan has him outfitted throughout the film in the same clothes he wore the night of his death: a sweater, a coat, with the implication that they’re covering his gunshot wound.)

Ah, but it’s a movie, and Cole’s observation that the dead “only see what they want to see” provides a great deal of narrative license. It’s the best kind of twist, the kind that surprises a first-time viewer, but where the clues seem obvious after re-watching. Indeed, some of the early successes of The sixth sense It can surely be attributed to the fact that returning moviegoers caught up again with what they missed; critic Craig Nash recently recalled seeing it four times during its theatrical tour.

For better or worse, the end of The sixth sense it immediately seeped into the popular consciousness, became familiar even to people who never saw the film, and ushered in our current era of “spoiler culture.” It also gave Shyamalan a reputation for delivering surprise twists, a reputation he carried over to later hits such as signs (2002) and the most recent return vehicle old man (2021), but which has also become self-parody (The Village). He’s often cheesy and guilty of writing terrible dialogue, but the man is undeniably an auteur with a vision of his own. (And with the frankly silly trapfinally made one Silence of the lambs-an inspired serial killer movie!)

To the extent that Shyamalan has a flourishing career today, and surprising success Call the cabin i trap proves that it does: it owes to the last 10 minutes of The sixth sense. With a powerful twist, he finished a movie and started a career.