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flick pick | The Sixth Sense 1999 Directed + written by: M. Night Shyamalan Starring: Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment Language: English Look for it at the video store under: drama, thriller Watch it when you’re in the mood for something: mind-bending The critic says: / 5 the rating system explained Fun factor: /5

Plot synopsis Cole Sear is a little boy with a secret: He sees dead people. They walk around everywhere, looking every bit as gruesome as in their final moments of life, completely unaware that they’ve died at all. It’s pretty scary, but he doesn’t dare tell anyone, not even his mom – the kids at school already pick on him for being odd, and he doesn’t want the one person in the world who loves him to start looking at him the way everyone else does, like he’s some freak. So instead he goes through his days looking haunted and wary, distrustful and frightened, feeling completely alone. Then Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a respected child psychologist, pays him a visit. Cole’s case has caught Malcolm’s attention: Malcolm bears a striking similarity to an ex-patient of his, one who recently showed up at Malcolm’s house, blaming the doctor for not curing his desperate unhappiness, before committing suicide in front of Malcolm and his wife. Malcolm desperately wants to be able to help this boy, in part to appease his guilty conscience over the other one, and to get over the depression that’s been putting a strain on his relationship with his wife. Slowly he begins to gain Cole’s trust – and soon Cole’s helping Malcolm sort out his own life in a reverse take on the usual psychiatrist-patient relationship.

Review Signs was perfectly solid, Unbreakable pretty interesting, but The Sixth Sense is still the only one of M. Night Shyamalan’s films that’s felt like a fully gratifying, spot-on perfect piece of entertainment to me. By now, just about everyone knows it’s a ghost story with a twist – but what makes The Sixth Sense hold up even on subsequent viewings is that the "surprise" ending is actually so obvious the whole way through. The clues are present from the very get-go, and it’s only because Shyamalan’s storytelling is so deft and his characters so compellingly real that as a viewer, you find yourself sucked thoroughly, immediately into that world — so much so that you can’t see what’s right in front of your eyes, you’re so sure you already know what’s there. It’s pretty rare for a mainstream movie to be able to catch the audience by surprise, but that’s exactly what The Sixth Sense manages to accomplish. Still, The Sixth Sense is more than just a cleverly-executed trick ending – while the plot twists and ghost scares may be what make the film such a visceral delight, it’s the relationship between Cole and Malcolm that imbue it with emotional depth and resonance. Both Bruce Willis as Malcolm and Haley Joel Osment as Cole give beautifully-nuanced, intelligent, understated performances that provide the perfect dose of realism to ground the paranormal happenings. In the end, The Sixth Sense is as much an intimate character-driven drama as it is a supernatural thriller – and deeply satisfying to watch on both counts.
—reviewed by Y. Sun

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