From The Sixth Sense onwards, M Night Shyamalan has established himself as the master of the movie twist. We take a look back at some of his earliest third-act turns.
NB: The following contains spoilers for The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village and Split.
When you think of the greatest movie twists in cinematic history, chances are The Sixth Sense, M Night Shyamalan’s haunting, elegiac ghost story from 1999, might come to mind. It quickly became cemented in pop culture as the kind of third act turn we might have seen had we been looking in the right place.
Shyamalan has never quite topped The Sixth Sense in terms of cultural reach, even if some critics consider aspects of his later work better overall. He peaked immediately as a writer-director at the turn of the century; an unusual blend of 1970s auteur on the one hand and a child of Spielbergian emotive wonder on the other. What he became known for, rightly or wrongly, was the movie twist.
With his latest thriller, Trap, about to arrive amid a resurgence of critical acclaim in recent years, it seems timely to look back at Shyamalan’s earlier twists and determine if they truly deserve to be the defining aspect of his body of work to date.
Spoilers, naturally, to follow.
The Sixth Sense (1999)
I make that disclaimer about spoilers because the twist in The Sixth Sense was ruined for me via the most unlikely programme – Fantasy Football, a comedy talk show where Frank Skinner soiled his fellow Brummie credentials for me forever by declaring “Bruce Willis is a ghost” on ITV. Shocking form.
There is little doubt, however, just how impactful Shyamalan’s ghost story was on broader popular culture in 1999. A monster August hit in the United States, reaching Britain in the autumn, it’s a measured, hauntingly sad tale of Cole (Haley Joel Osment), a young boy who declares “I see dead people.” And he does, in Willis’ calm, melancholic child psychologist Dr Malcolm Crowe.
It’s clearly a twist hiding in plain sight once you see the film a second time and notice that Crowe only ever communicates with Cole. A key scene where he dines with Olivia Williams’ wife is cleverly written in hindsight. The clues are there; it simply becomes a misdirect, and one that immediately turned Shyamalan into a cinematic Houdini. Willis’ beautifully understated performance equally helps to sell the power of that reveal.
However you might feel about The Sixth Sense and whether it stands the test of time (I would argue that it does), there’s little doubt that it created a sense of expectation as to what Shyamalan might do next. Could he repeat the trick?
Unbreakable (2000)
For me, Unbreakable surpasses The Sixth Sense and stands, even almost a quarter of a century on, as Shyamalan’s best work. A beautiful ode to the comic book movie, it manages to retain at once the melancholy of his previous work while opening up, steadily, into something altogether more mythic.
Willis’ David Dunn, a mild-mannered family man who survives a devastating train crash that kills every other passenger, slowly begins to discover, thanks to Samuel L Jackson’s crippled comic book store owner Elijah Price, that he’s ‘unbreakable’; gifted of superhuman power. His alliterative name, a broken family dynamic and an origin story flecked with tragedy inform Shyamalan’s deconstruction of the superhero myth.
His twist in Unbreakable is less a supernatural sleight of hand, rather a mythological one. Elijah reveals himself, in the grand tradition of all supervillains, to our hero as the Joker to his Batman, the flipside of a coin – as Dunn is ‘unbreakable’, Elijah breaks easily. “They called me Mr Glass” should be as iconic a line as Osment’s, part of a glorious revelation that places the entire film in a new, more tragic context.
Unbreakable isn’t the showiest of Shyamalan’s twists, but for me it stands as his finest. It makes sense, not just on a narrative level, but in speaking to the mythic constructs the writer-director explores. It’s one of the great endings in modern cinema.
Signs (2002)
Does the rot begin to set in for Shyamalan’s twisty penchant as early as Signs? Possibly. It is, arguably, the weakest of his initial cinematic twists and, on the whole, isn’t quite as potent a narrative left turn as his previous two films. Signs provides more of a thematic rapture than a storytelling one.
The hype for Signs, given the critical and commercial success of the previous two films, was palpable ahead of the film’s release. Shyamalan never gives us too much in advance of any of his films, but having tackled ghosts and superheroes, he turns his attention to both aliens and God, and the intersection of both, in arguably his most Spielberg-like picture to this point.
Mel Gibson is Graham Hess, a former priest who suffered a crisis of faith after the death of his wife in a car crash. Then he discovers crop circles in his remote farm and, alongside brother Merrill and his two young children, begins to realise they’re witnessing the beginnings of an alien invasion. Shyamalan’s gambit is to place this huge, well-trodden science fiction concept inside the contained space of the Hess homestead.
Though Signs builds up tension nicely, boasting some creeping alien glimpses and reveals, and indeed does stick an emotional landing in how Graham rediscovers his faith, the ‘twist’ of these powerful alien invaders being allergic to water is a ridiculous herald of Shyamalan’s more eccentric films to come.
The Village (2004)
For me, The Village boasts Shyamalan’s most underrated twist ending and perhaps his most deliberately acute in wanting the audience to gasp in surprise. On first watch, it’s genuinely quite difficult to see it coming, given how Shyamalan immerses us into the world of the titular ‘village’.
With aliens now checked off the quasi-supernatural list, Shyamalan turns to the fairy tale with The Village's monster in the woods. He places us in 19th century Pennsylvania (where almost all of his films are set) and a puritanical assortment of citizens guard against ‘Those We Don’t Speak Of’ across the woodland perimeter. Joaquin Phoenix returns from Signs as Lucius Hunt, another introspective and quiet Shyamalan man, who seeks to go beyond the border to the ‘towns’ beyond.
Events conspire to lead Bryce Dallas Howard’s blind Ivy Walker, daughter of one the village elders, to head into the woods to retrieve medicines to heal Lucius, allowing Shyamalan to tease dark fairy tale tropes of strange creatures. The twist is when Ivy climbs a fence only to find a modern road and a park ranger in his car, at which point the audience realises it’s the 20th century, not the 19th, and the village is living a lie.
The point is that the elders rejected capitalism and technology to lead a quieter, agrarian life, away from the demands of the modern world, and some perhaps found this less enticing than Shyamalan’s teased monsters. The Village, for me, is all the more impressive in how it surprises us while remaining entirely plausible throughout.
The 2010s and beyond
Shyamalan’s swift fall from grace begins with The Village but goes into sharp decline through a series of misjudged efforts such as The Happening, Lady in the Water, The Last Airbender and so on, before a steady resurgence from The Visit in 2015 has seen his stock soar once more, especially after what turned out to be a well-judged return to the Unbreakable world with Split and Glass.
Split contains Shyamalan’s primary ‘meta’ twist, by virtue of nobody realising it was set in the Unbreakable ‘universe’ until a post-credits scene revealed Willis’ David Dunn. It laid the foundations for Glass, which brought both previous films together for a satisfying finale. While playing into the penchant for post-credit sequences across the 2010s, Shyamalan also gives Split a twist that plays into established comic book tropes in terms of expanded universes.
Whether his films work for you or not, M Night Shyamalan remains a showman. His trailers intentionally tease a scenario without tipping his hand to a degree few directors have the power to influence. We continue to approach his films with the expectation of a twist, a surprise, a rug pull, and for not everything to be quite as it seems. It’s what makes him, for better or worse, a unique filmmaker.
Trap, his latest, will surely be no exception. Maybe the clue’s in the title.
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