The Dreams and Nightmares of M. Night Shyamalan

Film writer and director M. Night Shyamalan achieved commercial acclaim in 1999 with his third film, The Sixth Sense, which is largely remembered by Haley Joel Osment’s immortal line “I see dead people”. Afterwards, Shyamalan’s career gathered momentum with films such as Unbreakable, Signs, the Village, and the recent Lady in the Water, establishing a personal style of lateral twists and eerie atmosphere that Roger Ebert describes as “essentially con games” with the audience.

The Sixth Sense was the first commercially successful film that Shyamalan wrote and directed and set the trend for his succeeding films. Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is a child psychologist who, after being shot by a former patient, tries to aid the hallucinatory Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Cole tells Dr. Crowe that he can see dead people, and the skeptical Dr. Crowe advises Cole to communicate with and aid his ghosts. After successful therapy with Cole, Dr. Crowe returns to his wife to reconcile, and the audience soon discovers that Crowe was one of Cole’s ghosts all along.

Shyamalan’s progenitor turn, his signature “twist”, isn’t what’s so clever. The credit goes into the delivery of the story into the unsuspecting eyes of the audience. He masterfully avoids detection through explicable, but unsuspicious maneuvering. There is no indication that Dr. Crowe is a ghost – but there’s no give away that he is. The story is peppered with gasping moments and progresses cautiously, beckoning us into each new presentation of evidence, until we are in the last room, Shyamalan’s insistent finger has disappeared, and the rub is unfolding in revelation.

Unbreakable followed The Sixth Sense in 2000 with the same ambition, but with a slower plot progression that barely clings to any real suspense. Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is a fragile comic book store owner born with a rare bone disorder that severely weakens his skeletal structure. Price searches for the meaning behind his fragility and contacts security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who was the miraculous sole survivor of a massive train wreck. Price proposes that “unbreakable” Dunn is actually a superhero. Dunn has the ability to view a person’s immoral behavior upon touch and has only been sick once in his life – when he nearly drowned as a youth. Price tells Dunn these are typical super hero characteristics. The big twist occurs when Dunn discovers remnants of blueprints and newspaper clippings of major disasters in Price’s store. Price calmly confesses that he caused the accidents to find his opposite – someone with an incredibly hardened bone structure.

The plot has creative potential – it’s a unique approach to the superhero mythologies. Shyamalan tries to adapt a believable story of a superhero through reasonable explanations – such as Price’s bone disorder and Dunn’s crippling weakness to water. Price’s obsession with finding his counterpart is a bit outlandish – he’s too concerned with the big picture to have any malice. By the end of the movie, his indifferent sabotaging just doesn’t fit in with his otherwise didactic and energetic insistence. The movie offered the eerie, suspenseful mood that Sixth Sense had, but fell just short of achieving it..

The Village was released in 2004 and followed M.Night’s Signs. Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in an isolated village surrounded by a vast expanse of forest. The perimeter of the village is marked off by flags to warn the townsfolk of trespassing into the woods where “Those We Don’t Speak Of” reside. After a child dies of illness, Lucius volunteers to travel beyond the woods to retrieve medical supplies, but is wounded by a mentally unstable villager, Noah Percy (Adrien Brody). The blind daughter of the town elder, also Lucius’ love interest, takes the mission upon herself and ventures into the woods to find the towns beyond, at the risk of upsetting the forest-dwelling creatures.

By the time the Village was released, Shyamalan’s usual plot formula had lost all of its luster. There are precisely orchestrated moments of tension – most used with minimal special effects, as is typical of M. Night – that actually bring a tingle or two. Lucius’ stabbing is sudden and contrived though, playing into the predictable metaphorical appointment of the task to the blind daughter of the village leader. The movie places a lot of momentum in the early parts of the movie, a momentum that’s dispelled with the first twist of the story — the forest creatures are concoctions of the villagers themselves – and the film limps along until the second major twist arrives.

Shyamalan’s repeated use of a plot twist works against him. Audiences had a taste of his mischief after the Sixth Sense, and could expect a similarly unusual picture from Unbreakable. With Signs, the ploy was becoming increasingly familiar until, by the time the Village was released, the revelation that the isolated village was actually in the center of a modern nature reserve was a ten minute fancy that withered into at most, a nod of indifference.

Shyamalan gets a lot of credit for creative twists, but all that he’s really doing after the Sixth Sense is setting a predictable trap for his turn and applying an outlandish curve that leaves little chance for accurate foresight. Bruce Willis’ indestructible body is explained away as a super heroic quality, and Samuel Jackson’s frailty is attributed to his preconceived villain status, but we aren’t left with any reasoning as to why they’re the way they are; only Samuel Jackson’s overeager insistence that because of his concentrated abilities, and, well, destiny, there must be a supplementary opposite to his essence. In Signs, it isn’t much of a surprise when the intruding force on Mel Gibson’s Pennsylvania farm is an alien, and though actually seeing the alien near the end instills an atmosphere of anxiety, the surprise only leaves a disappointing aftertaste. Shyamalan avoided this major, gimmicky twist in Lady in the Water, but if it continues, the audience will only predict more extravagant outcomes so that when he does unveil a catch, his version is as interchangeable as anyone’s, but finalized through his authority as writer and director.