Disney
The Sixth Sense was a cultural touchstone in 1999: endlessly referenced, parodied, and discussed by America at large.
The film’s catchphrase, “I see dead people” became a shorthand in everything from political satire to advertisements and the incredible 670 million dollar worldwide gross, second only to the first new Star Wars film in sixteen years, seemed to signal both the emergence of a powerful new filmmaker and a career renaissance for star Bruce Willis.
It was, without exaggeration, a cultural event and the discussion surrounding the film’s ultimate twist even birthed our modern “spoiler warning” culture.
It seems impossible that anyone reading this could be unaware of the plot, but for the uninitiated:
After being attacked by a former patient whom he could not help, child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) begins to see Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a nine year old boy who seems deeply troubled and lives with his single mother (Toni Collette).
As he begins to treat Sear, Crowe comes to realize that he’s got the troubling gift of seeing ghosts with unfinished business whenever he’s alone. Crowe must help Sear deal with these ghosts as he tries to save his relationship with his estranged wife (Olivia Williams).
The Sixth Sense is both a legendary script, and was directed with such skill and poise that it garnered Shyamalan comparisons to both Hitchcock and Speilberg but returning to the film twenty-five years later, what truly stands out is the pitch-perfect cinematography by Tak Fujimoto (The Silence of the Lambs). The Sixth Sense depends enormously on its use of color, and lighting to create atmosphere and inform the audience of when the ghosts are present. Digital photography has its advantages but it is difficult to draw to mind a recent film with the same depth of color and shadow present here.
The cinematography supports tremendous performances from all the principal actors here. Osment, in particular, probably gives the greatest child performance in the history of Hollywood here. The images of his face, wet with tears, delivering the line “I see dead people” is indelible in the consciousness of anyone who went to the movies in the 90’s, but it’s the moment in the car when Cole finally explains to his mother that demonstrates mastery– many child actors are capable of calling to the fore huge swaths of emotion, but Osment’s skill in conveying how he’s holding back overwhelming emotion is a trick many adult actors never learn.
You can’t talk about The Sixth Sense without discussing Bruce Willis and the very particular moment in his career that it took place in. As big budget action films began to wane in popularity through the 90’s, Willis found a niche as a leading man in auteur driven pieces like Pulp Fiction and Breakfast of Champions displaying a greater range than either of his major contemporaries Schwartzenegger and Stallone.
The Sixth Sense (and his next collaboration with Shyamalan’s Unbreakable) display an everyman, Old Hollywood quality to his persona that had been present since Moonlighting but not always utilized effectively. He gives a deeply nuanced, often quietly heartfelt performance here and watching this film in 2024, it’s very bittersweet given his current condition to see him at a high water mark in skill.
All of these elements orbit around writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s masterful control of pace, atmosphere, and visual storytelling. The Sixth Sense was conceptualized as a script so good that Disney would have to allow Shyamalan to direct it, in order to make it and it shows. There’s a Rod Serling-esque discipline in how information is doled out, and how the central twist of the film is obscured that make the film famously rewatchable. The Sixth Sense operates in a very rare category: a horror film that both feels authentic and is restrained enough that a general audience can enjoy it. That’s a credit to how the scares are real, but rooted in character moments and deep emotion so that the film never feels like exploitation, even when it probably ought to. It rewards careful observation, leaves room for the imagination, and roots the fantastical elements in the most universal kinds of emotion: fear of losing one’s family and their trust, fears of being ostracized etc.
I don’t know that Shyamalan has ever totally delivered on the promise of his first three films, but the fact remains that those first three films, The Sixth Sense included, display an emotional intelligence and storytelling instincts that make them evergreen films.
They worked, they still work, and they will always work because they play on our most basic fears and kindle our hope that we can work around them to understand our world and ourselves.
Highly recommended.
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