Sixth Sense sensibilities
Shyamalan’s reaction to his phenomenal flick: ‘Wow’
Film critics are inured these days to publicists warning not to reveal too much about the movies we review.
Here’s a typical boilerplate request: “In order to give audiences around the world the opportunity to enjoy this movie to the fullest and allow them to discover any surprises and plot twists, we respectfully ask that you, as press, refrain from revealing spoilers and detailed story points in your coverage.” And that was for Ant-Man and the Wasp!
It was a more forgiving time in August of 1999, when an almost unknown writer/ director, M. Night Shyamalan, released The Sixth Sense. It was hardly the first twist ending in film history — a partial list includes The Usual Suspects (1995), The Crying Game (1992), Psycho (1960) and on back to Citizen Kane in 1940. As long ago as 1921, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ended with — 98-year-old spoiler alert! — the revelation that its narrator is insane.
But there was something special going on here. Unlike an out-of-the-blue twist as in Planet of the Apes, or a sudden mid-movie revelation such as the one in The Empire Strikes Back, The Sixth Sense gave viewers all the clues they needed to figure out the cat before it was let out of the bag. (Not that audiences did, although even today you can find people who swear they knew it from the first frame.) Watch for the colour red in certain scenes, and note Bruce Willis’s wardrobe, and you may get a sense of what’s going on.
I recently rewatched The Sixth Sense and was impressed with both the film’s restrained pacing — the first big scare doesn’t arrive until almost halfway through this ghost story — and the naturalism of the characters. Even when creepy kid Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), learns that maybe the dead people he sees don’t mean any harm, he’s still understandably freaked out by most of them.
Less impressed was National Post film critic Finbarr O’Reilly. “Throughout the film, you keep waiting for something dramatic to happen,” he wrote in 1999. “But it never does, except for a great plot twist at the end that requires such a spectacular suspension of disbelief that it undermines the film’s last shred of integrity. It’s so implausible, in fact, that the filmmakers resort to a Scooby-Doo ending where they replay several earlier scenes as the villain is unmasked and the mystery recapped. Except here there’s no villain and the only mystery is why this film was made in the first place. Anyone with any sense, let alone a sixth sense, would have let this project slip by, just like a ghost.”
Audiences didn’t agree, and turned out in droves that summer to see The Sixth Sense. It earned $25.8 million in its first weekend, setting a new record for an August opening, and then managed the almost unheard-of feat of making even more in its second week — $26.1 million. And The Blair Witch Project had just opened a week before, so it’s not as though horror fans were starved for material.
The Sixth Sense eventually would earn $293 million, making it the second-highest-grossing film of the year, after Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. It was also the highest-grossing supernatural horror of all time until 2017, when the Stephen King adaptation It made $327 million. And it topped the box office for five weeks in a row, a feat managed only by two films in this century — Avatar and Black Panther. It earned six Oscar nominations: best picture, director, screenplay, editing, supporting actress (Toni Collette as Cole’s mom), and supporting actor for Osment, one of the youngest nominees ever.
It was quite the year for horror movies. When The Sixth Sense finally dropped out of first place at the box office, its place was taken by another spooky offering, Stigmata. The following year, the DVD and VHS release of The Sixth Sense became the top rental and purchase of 2000.
It’s become fashionable in the years since to write pieces about the slow death spiral of Shyamalan’s career, but if we don’t compare everything to the out-of-the-gate wonder that was The Sixth Sense, he hasn’t had a bad run. Shyalaman has directed 12 films. Take away two tiny independent releases and two monster hits — Sixth Sense and 2002’s Signs — and you’re left with eight films that averaged $88 million at the box office.
The biggest difference is in return on investment. The Last Airbender of 2010 (five per cent at rottentomatoes), earned $131 million but cost $150 million to make. His latest, 2017’s Split (76 per cent rating), made $139 million on a budget of just $9 million. No wonder that its followup, Glass, has a budget of $20 million, a pittance for a so-called superhero movie.
But wherever Shyamalan goes from here, he’ll always have The Sixth Sense to look back on fondly. In an interview on the 2004 DVD release of the movie, he recalls that serendipitous summer of ’99:
“The movie gets done and no one’s paying any attention to it, and they let you make the movie yourself — wow. That’s so unusual because you have no power of any kind. Superstar’s letting you do anything you want, he really trusts you — wow. And then you show the movie to the studio and they think it’s one of the best movies they have — wow. They move the date up, it’s on your birthday — wow. Broke a record on its opening — wow. It’s one of the highest -grossing movies of all time.”
Wow.