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USA 1999
Reviewed by Philip Strick
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Philadelphia. Psychologist Malcolm Crowe is celebrating his latest award with his wife Anna when former patient Vincent Gray breaks in. Blaming Malcolm's therapy for his dementia, Vincent shoots him, then kills himself.
Months later Malcolm takes on the case of nine-year-old Cole Sear, a disturbed schoolboy living with his mother Lynn. While gaining the boy's confidence, Malcolm begins to have misgivings about his marriage, suspecting Anna of having an affair.
Malcolm enlists Cole's co-operation by telling him about Vincent, and at last Cole reveals his secret: he is visited by dead people only he can see, who plead for his help. Baffled by this delusion, Malcolm despairs of helping the boy, but Cole begs him not to abandon his case. Listening to the tape of his sessions with Vincent, Malcolm suspects a supernatural element and begins to reconsider Cole's claims.
One of Cole's 'visitors' Kyra leads Cole to a videotape that proves to the guests at her funeral that she was murdered. Cole is cheered by his schoolmates, previously his tormentors, for his performance in the school play. Able now to discuss his 'gift' with his mother, who accepts he has special powers, he and Malcolm agree there is no further need for therapy. Returning home, Malcolm recognises that his loving relationship with Anna will always survive Vincent's fatal bullet.
Constantly on the brink of explanation, The Sixth Sense in fact derives most of its fascination from explaining next to nothing. A mass of disquieting details, it takes a number of detours towards a final reversal that throws everything open to question. What was masquerading as one case history gradually becomes several, most prominently that of the psychologist but also those of the mother, the wife, the suicidal psychotic and an ever-widening circle of the troubled and dispossessed.
Inadvertent guide to these lost souls, whether they're alive or in some other limbo, is the bewildered schoolboy Cole. He eventually comes to terms with his power, graduating from crime buster to marriage counsellor while retaining the skills of a seaside-booth medium ("Grandma says 'Hi!'"). But what kind of future awaits him in the employment of his now-validated gift is left to the imagination.
Director/writer M. Night Shyamalan has been film-making since the age of ten, although primed for a top-grade medical career. Future retrospectives will doubtless reveal to British audiences his 45 short films, his acclaimed 1992 debut feature Praying With Anger, and his second film Wide Awake (1997). But for now, The Sixth Sense (and its huge US box-office success) looks to have materialised almost out of nowhere.
At least we can guess from the available clues that Shyamalan's main concerns are isolation (he took the role of his own 'ghost' in Praying With Anger) and the strains and tensions of family ties: Wide Awake is about the relationship between a Catholic schoolboy and his grandfather. And generous doses of autobiography can be detected in The Sixth Sense, both in the character of the cool-headed specialist who finds his career on the wrong path and in that of the child haunted by innumerable dramas in need of an audience.
These traits aside, the film's main appeal is the assurance with which it is made. Studiously versed in art-house classics as much as in Spielberg or Craven, Shyamalan's film is an attention-grabbing fusion of minimalism and overstatement. His horror story is shot as Tarkovsky might have shot it, with briefly glimpsed figures on the fringes and with constant ambiguities of action and attitude. Setting the mood, the opening scene in the wine cellar, the camera hiding furtively behind the racks, would persuade us that an unseen intruder is about to pounce, but he doesn't, and what we've gained instead is a sketch of a highly strung wife along with a timely reminder of the ritualistic status of wine. And then he pounces, in the bathroom where, moments earlier, the psychologist who is about to learn of failure has suggested they consign his latest award.
It fits together so smoothly that one feels that Shyamalan could leave almost anything on the screen for us to assimilate. Since, for instance, he knows Philadelphia, his home town, well, his glimpses of a landmark sculpture plainly add up to something more than the passage of time. But such references are part of the film's attraction as well as its weakness. Keeping us guessing before the full misery of Cole's predicament becomes apparent, there are curiously misleading hints of his paranormal powers, at their strongest in his mother's presence.
Leaving Cole in the kitchen for a moment, his mother returns to find every drawer and door open. Examining family photographs, she finds the same flash of light in each one. Such images have a vivid but unresolved potency, distracting us from more awkward matters. Where does the psychologist go between the Vincent episode and the Cole assignment? If Cole's visitors don't know they're dead, why do they want his help? The enigmas remain, but since another of Shyamalan's accomplishments has been to coax exquisite performances from his cast (including Haley Joel Osment and an intensely introverted Bruce Willis) we are happy to share their bewilderment rather than dismissing it.