M. Night Shyamalan’s career is a victim of audience expectations. The Sixth Sense was and still is sensationalized for its twist when in fact it stands as a great film even without the shocking final reveal. Since The Sixth Sense the director has been judged not as a filmmaker, a task at which he frequently excels, but as a showman whose work is only as good as that first viewing of The Sixth Sense. In this way Shyamalan is doomed to fail, and even become a punchline for “twistiness” on shows like Robot Chicken and South Park.
But then, Shyamalan maybe shouldn’t have ended The Village the way he did. Like any director who hits it big, Shyamalan has had some massive failures — After Earth comes to mind — but also some enduring successes. Shyamalan’s follow-up to The Sixth Sense, the ever-watchable Unbreakable, is a prescient commentary on pre-MCU superhero cinema as well as a great drama in its own right. When Shyamalan finally delivered a sequel in the form of 2019’s Glass, he fittingly adapted the critique to the incomprehensibly interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe by incorporating the characters from his previous film Split.
Glass cemented what I suspected about M. Night Shyamalan all along: for all the director’s failures, his successes are consistently worthwhile. Shyamalan is remembered for twisty turns in the final moments of his films, but it’s not the splashy moments that keep me coming back to his work: it’s the quiet (and often unsettling) moments of stillness, the moments of humanity that lurk beneath the horror.
Because for all the bravado of a Shyamalan twist, his best films are deeply intimate. Lady in the Water, a film that doesn’t suck nearly as much as I’d been led to believe, is essentially a chamber drama that revolves around a swimming pool in a nondescript apartment complex, while The Visit somehow sticks the landing on yet another found footage film set largely in a single rural property. Even The Sixth Sense is essentially a lengthy conversation between two lost souls.
This intimacy is what drives Shyamalan’s films. Any supernatural elements are usually subtle and vague, to the point that their very existence is questionable, as in Unbreakable, Split, and Glass. In many ways it is mental illness — the literal subject of Split and The Visit — that always undergirds Shyamalan’s work as a usually unspoken factor. Anything out of place in a Shyamalan film is as much a perceptual construct as a concrete reality: the ability to speak to the dead in The Sixth Sense, decoding a series of fairy tale tropes in Lady in the Water, the wave of suicides in The Happening, fear itself in After Earth, the multiple personas of Split, dementia in The Visit, and even the very time period itself in The Village. The Shyamalaniverse is all about how humans engage with the world, as well as the other humans around them, as much as any supernatural phenomena.
There is a sense in Shyamalan’s films that what is mundane at times becomes unsettling at other times. Like the birds in The Birds, there are enigmatic and unexplained (perhaps natural, perhaps unnatural) cycles that drive Shyamalan’s films, most obviously films like The Happening, Signs, and The Visit, but all the director’s work tends to give off a kind of circadian rhythm of the supernatural.
For example, the concept of “sundowning” takes on sinister new meaning in The Visit, a film that does an amazing job keeping viewers on their toes. As the film teases the mystery behind the grandparents, the disconcerting occurrences that are written off as aging: dementia, incontinence, and the tendency for times of day to impact mood and mental state, aka sundowning. What makes The Visit so horrifying, and so successful, in the long run is the revelation that these excuses are not entirely untrue. The grandparents at the center of The Visit are indeed subject to biological rhythms and age-related decline.
But in Shyamalan’s inimitable fashion, the twist at end of The Visit — that the “grandparents” are in fact two impostors who have escaped from a mental hospital — somehow only drives home the eeriness of their behavior, explainable through entirely organic methods. One reason (among many) that I think After Earth fails as a Shyamalan film is that it falls too far beyond the real. Shyamalan’s great films are frighteningly plausible.
The best part of the unfortunately underrated The Happening comes towards the end, as the three survivors come across a woman who has completely isolated herself from society and is in fact unaware of the wave of mass suicides in the area in which she resides. Betty Buckley gives one of the best Shyamalan performances ever as a recluse who honestly deserves her own movie. Like the best of Shyamalan’s characters and settings, there’s a story behind this woman of which we are only given a glimpse.
This is why I actually think The Happening is one of Shyamalan’s finest films. It was mocked at the time for the silliness of the premise that the trees are forcing people to kill themselves, and Mark Wahlberg gives a poor performance only highlighted by a cast that includes Betty Buckley as well as Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo. But really, what I love about The Happening is the richness of the supporting characters and settings, which invariably suggest more that what we are privileged to witness.
The Happening is able to deliver this in part because it is a sort of road movie, travelling to a wider array of locations that most films. But when Shyamalan sticks to a single location, as in Lady in the Water, it’s an apartment complex that offers highly incomplete windows into a wide range of people and stories at which we can ultimately only guess. Lady in the Water is a story in which characters from a half-dozen different stories become aware of their role in another.
This is an undervalued quality of cinema. While literature presses itself to delve deeply into side characters, settings, and stories (something Stephen King does very well), cinema is frequently criticized for an inability to create such depth. But the too infrequently utilized skill of cinema is to show only a piece of a whole, to let the audience fill in the gaps in what we are allowed access. Jacques Tati excelled in this regard (including a sequence in Playtime that literally looks through a set of windows from the street), as did Richard Linklater with perhaps the greatest use of this technique, Slacker, and Shyamalan too has a gift for tantalizingly brief glimpses of what could be entire films, if only the filmmaker chose to focus on them.
Turns out the twist of Shyamalan’s career arc is that he’s actually a really talented writer-director whose work surpasses superficial understandings of his storytelling style.
[Author’s note: this article was accidentally published three or four times in incomplete form as I was working on it because I thought it would be done much sooner. Sorry about that.]
