Do me a favour – forget everything you remember about The Sixth Sense for a moment.
Easier said than done, I know. A quarter of a century since it was initially released, director M Night Shyamalan’s ghost story is still inextricably woven into the cultural fabric. Its most famous quote – “I see dead people” – is the opening line of Kendrick Lamar’s blockbuster Drake diss track Not Like Us, which has hovered near the top of the charts 12 weeks in a row. It’s a meme, a punch line, an afterthought.
Most importantly, it‘s a masterpiece made by an Indian American immigrant, then 28, who yearned to be the next Steven Spielberg but wasn’t yet ready for the mantle. And ever since, it’s become the albatross around his neck.
After a string of steady hits made in its wake – Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) – Shyamalan lost his groove with the public. A series of misses turned him into a laughing stock – some awful (2013’s After Earth), some merely misunderstood (2004’s The Village). He couldn’t top his breakout hit and as the attempts became worse, and he grew into more of a John Carpenter or Brian De Palma-type of a filmmaker than a Spielberg, the disdain only grew. For more than a decade, saying you were a fan was like telling people you listened to Nickelback unironically. His capital offence was that he had flown too close to the sun, and some people just love to watch a fall.
All that hate wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t delivered a film remarkable in nearly every way. Watching it back, it hasn’t lost an ounce of its power.
Here’s the set-up, in case you remember the twist, but forget the particulars. Bruce Willis plays a child psychologist named Malcolm Crowe, renowned for his ability to help troubled youth. One night, he’s home with his wife celebrating a major commendation for his work when a man breaks into his house – a former patient who he couldn’t save. He offers to try again, but the man won’t hear it, pulling out a gun to shoot him before shooting himself.
We cut to a year later and his life has fallen apart. He and his wife are practically strangers. It seems all hope is lost until he meets a tortured boy who reminds him of the patient he couldn’t save and shows him a path to redemption.
The plot mechanics at work in The Sixth Sense are elegant and extraordinarily executed, but this is not a mere thrill ride. This is popcorn cinema at its most purely empathetic – a horror film where the true horror is in not being seen, heard or understood by those around us, especially the people we love.
What troubles the boy? He puts it plainly – he sees dead people. Everywhere he goes, there are ghosts who don’t know that they’re dead, each plagued by their unfinished business, desperate for help. The boy, played by Hayley Joel Osment in perhaps the best performance by a child actor in the history of cinema, is desperate too, yearning to be free of his curse but resigned to the fact he may never be.
He’s a burden on his single mother, played by Toni Collette, and he knows it. He can’t tell her why. No one knows his secret, but everyone around him labels him as a freak and a part of himself does, too.
Each character in the film is reaching out for a helping hand, each feeling profoundly alone in their plight. Crowe realises that the only way he can help himself is to help someone else. And once he gains the boy’s trust, accepting him as he is, they find the solution to his curse – help the dead that are crying out to him in need.
All of this might feel sentimental if the film weren’t so understated. Each shot is simple but thoughtful. The score never overwhelms. The scares build with slow dread. The reason it works – and why no one sees the twist coming – is Willis, who is restrained throughout. He talks to the boy as children want to be talked to – as just another human, without condescension. Willis drifts into the background like a good rhythm section, which allows Osment’s emotionality to saturate. And when our attention finally turns back to Willis, in the moment the boy is finally able to help him in return, it's devastating to learn how little he can.
There’s trauma baked into every frame of The Sixth Sense. None of it can be erased – neither the trauma inflicted on the characters nor the trauma they have inflicted on others. But there are pathways to healing, to forgiveness, to growth. Each character must accept what has happened, see themselves as they truly are, and love themselves – even their own scars.
Shyamalan was born in India and moved to the US aged six. He was raised Hindu but was sent to a Catholic school in Philadelphia – where the film is set – and treated as an interloper by his peers and a lost soul by his elders.
One has to imagine he had to work through a lot of pain to make a film this full of love. Perhaps that’s why, even now at 53, his calloused heart seems undamaged by years of mockery by the film-going public, happy to be making original films like Trap (once again labelled as a comeback), which released this weekend in cinemas worldwide.
Even now, he reportedly often goes to film schools, and when he hears students express doubt as to whether their voice will matter in Hollywood, he pointedly dissuades them of that notion, telling them that what makes them different is what will make them powerful.
That’s a truth that he’s known his whole career. And never has he more clearly communicated it than in The Sixth Sense. If you don’t believe me, watch it again. It’s better than you remember.
The Sixth Sense is screening at Cinema Akil, Dubai, throughout August and is streaming on Disney+ in the Middle East
