The Sixth Sense (1999)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Written by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette
Released August 6th, 1999
Published August 7th, 2024
Will the real M. Night Shyamalan please stand up? Truly, I cannot tell who M. Night Shyamalan really is. On one hand, he’s a brilliant auteur who masterfully manipulated audiences in The Sixth Sense. On the other hand, he’s also the director of several of the weirdest and worst movies that I have ever seen, Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender,After Earth, and Glass. He’s also the wildly ambitious mind behind Knock at the Cabin and Old, two movies I don’t love but are, at the very least, wildly experimental in concept.
Just when I think I understand that Shyamalan is a studio guy, a director who needs to be reigned in by a heavy handed producer and distributor, he goes off and makes Split, a bizarre but effective comic book villain origin story that I found to be utterly brilliant. That film was his first truly great movie since he left Disney subsidiary Buena Vista Pictures which had provided that heavy hand of the studio on Shyamalan’s three previous great films, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and my personal favorite, Signs.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here.