The Class of 1999: 'The Sixth Sense'
This is an excellent movie even without the iconic surprise ending.
1999 was a historically-great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversaries. I recently re-reviewed The Iron Giant; next up on the docket is Beau Travail. But first… it’s time for…
The Sixth Sense - written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan - August 6, 1999
The Sixth Sense, like The Matrix, was a surprise cultural sensation. And for similar reasons! Much as The Phantom Menace and Wild Wild West were supposed to be the big spectacle pictures of the year, so The Blair Witch Project seemed all but assured to overshadow any other horror films. And much as Keanu Reeves’ previous foray into cyberpunk (Johnny Mnmenonic) had been a real stinker, so Bruce Willis’ recent attempt at a thriller co-starring a strange-yet-adorable moppet, Mercury Rising, was absolute trash. Plus, nobody had ever heard of M. Night Shyamalan. His previous credits were Praying with Anger, a microbudget indie drama no one ever heard of, and Wide Awake, a Rosie O’Donnell family comedy no one ever saw, which also featured a camera-friendly little kid as the co-lead (Shyamlan also did uncredited rewrites on She’s All That, which was released in January of ‘99; but, of course, none of us knew that at the time, and even if we had, it wouldn’t have impressed us all that much).
I saw The Sixth Sense with a friend at an early screening several weeks before it was released. I distinctly remember my friend and I assuming it was gonna suck.
It knocked our socks clean off.
The benefit of seeing the movie that way, I believe, is that not only did we not know about the now-infamous big twist, but we didn’t even know there was a twist.
And you know what made the twist especially mind-blowing?
The movie was really good even without it.
The Sixth Sense opens one evening in the Philadelphia home of child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Mr. Willis). He has just received an award from the city and is in the middle of celebrating with his wife, Anna (Olivia Williams), when they become aware that someone has broken into their home: Victor Gray (New Kid on the Block and future Saw victim Donnie Wahlberg), one of Malcolm’s child patients, now all grown up. He’s upset because Malcolm promised to help him but never did. “You failed me!” Victor screams before shooting Malcolm in the stomach and himself in the head.
Cut ahead a few months and Malcolm has apparently survived the shooting (this is where the casting of Willis is truly brilliant: as a bona fide action star, we’ve seen him casually survive gunshots a few thousand times before, and we feel, unconsciously, like, “Duh, well, of course he survived”). Malcolm’s new patient is a sweet young kid named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Cole, understandably, reminds Malcolm of Victor: they both have single mothers, neither has friends, and each has an inexplicable shock of white in their hair. It’s implied that Cole’s mom, Lynn (Toni Collette, reliably and casually incredible), has hired Malcolm to help Cole with his social issues; but Cole has some sort of secret he won’t share, but that he fears make him a “freak” (also a word Victor used to describe himself).
Seeing his chance for redemption after the trauma of failing Victor, Malcolm makes it his mission in life to help Cole. In so doing, however, he seems to increasingly neglect Anna, and soon begins to suspect she may be having an affair with her co-worker (Glenn Fitzgerald).
Still, Malcolm begins to make headway earning Cole’s trust. After a particularly terrifying incident at a classmate’s birthday party, Cole finally confides in Malcolm, delivering the iconic “I see dead people” speech.
At first, Malcolm believes that Cole is suffering from mental illness, and likely needs to be medicated and possibly institutionalized. This, combined with the deteriorating state of his marriage, convinces Malcolm that he needs to give up on Cole.
Of course, he doesn’t give up on Cole, instead digging up some old interviews he conducted with Victor. And he listens back to the recording so many times it’s a wonder he doesn’t wear the tape out, he finally hears a menacing, mysterious voice whispering to Victor in a foreign language. Now he believes Cole is telling him the truth.
So Malcolm goes to Cole and posits a theory that the ghosts don’t want to hurt the kid - they just want his help. Cole, despite being scared out of his wits, tests Malcolm’s theory by speaking with the creepy ghost of a dead little girl who can’t stop vomiting (a pre-The O.C. Mischa Barton). Cole is thus able to walk into the girl’s home with other mourners, locate a VHS tape proving her mother poisoned her to death, and give said VHS tape to the girl’s father.
Skip ahead awhile again and we see that Cole has become a happy, regular lil’ squirt, with a starring role in the school play. He still sees ghosts, who often died violently and thus look terrifying, but he’s no longer afraid of them, because he knows they mean him no harm. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, he proves to his mom that someday he could be at least as successful as Theresa Caputo.
Malcolm, meanwhile, goes home and figures out that he didn’t survive being shot by Victor, and has been one of Cole’s ghosts this entire time. Having now saved Cole (and, thus, Victory by proxy), Malcolm allows his soul to go to wherever its next stop is, thereby allowing Anna to move on with her life and hook up with her co-worker.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Well. Not Malcolm, I guess. But the rest of them.
So, first of all, yes, the big surprise at the end of the movie is fantastically executed. Unlike some Bruce Willis movies, the set-up is invisible, because it’s never extraneous. And Shyamalan, very much to his credit, doesn’t cheat, as evidenced by the montage at the end that recontextualizes everything that has come before… which also makes the movie a rewarding rewatch, because when you know the secret, scenes take on whole other meanings.
The twist is arguably the reason the film went on to become such a cultural force, but it’s not the sole reason to see the movie. This is generally true of all great movies that have a big surprise at the end, from Citizen Kane to The Usual Suspects to The Prestige; only crappy movies, like The Life of David Gale and Now You See Me, have nothing to offer beyond their gotcha moments.
Case in point: the way the narrative is laid out, the story technically has two twists. We don’t learn what’s really going on with Cole until almost halfway through the movie, which often feels far more like a domestic drama in the vein of Ordinary People than a traditional horror movie. Like the recent Abigail, The Sixth Sense might have been a victim of marketing necessities (come to think of it, the movie should probably have a less-spoilery title, too)… but it’s so good that audiences didn’t care they had to sit there for an hour and wait for Malcolm to figure out what we all knew from seeing the trailer.
It’s very hard to truly spoil a good yarn. And The Sixth Sense is a good yarn. It gets us invested in its trio of primary characters, who are either well-intentioned but also flawed (Malcolm, Lynn) or deeply sympathetic on account of being an innocent child who is suffering (Cole).
Furthermore, it has a pair of resonant deeper meanings:
The importance of speaking honestly with loved ones: Malcolm wants to explain himself to Anna, but can’t get her to listen to him (for different reasons than he thinks, of course, but still…), and Cole literally begins the moment when he’s going to come clean with Lynn by saying “I’m ready to communicate with you.” Furthermore, the ghosts all have something they feel they need to communicate; that’s what keeps them trapped in this world (which is not a unique idea, like, at all, but can still be a powerful one).
The ripple effect of trauma (in this case death), which keeps the traumatized trapped in a particular moment in time (in this case, the time of their unnatural death), and affects those around them (e.g., Anna, who can’t move on until Malcolm does, and Lynn, who frets about whether or not she ever made her dead mother proud).
In simplest terms, The Sixth Sense gets us invested in its cast and yanks our heartstrings.
That’s why The Sixth Sense would still ostensibly work without the twist: the penultimate scene with Cole and Lynn satisfyingly (and very emotionally) sows up their familial conflict…
…and if Malcolm went home and reconciled with Anna, I don’t think audiences would have been bummed if the last scene had simply been the Malcolm/Anna reconciliation you think it’s going to be.
Additionally, Shyamalan’s control over his craft as a director is undeniably deft. Take the scene when Malcolm plays a “game” with Cole to try and get the child to sit down and open up. The rules of the game are that Malcolm is going to “read Cole’s mind,” and for every fact he gets correct, Cole has to take a step towards the chair; for each one he gets wrong, Cole can retreat. A lot of director’s wouldn’t have thought to partially shoot the scene from Cole’s POV, with the camera moving first towards, and then away from, Malcolm. But it’s a brilliant decision, a simple way to make the scene more visually dynamic and create an unconscious emotional reaction within the audience: by the end of the scene, as the camera moves away from Malcolm, he not becomes smaller and less significant in the frame, but we understand what’s going on even before we see Cole step back1.
Point being, The Sixth Sense is a good story, well-told, period, and I think that’s why the line “I see dead people” is still instantly recognizable by almost anyone 25 years later.
Still, some elements of The Sixth Sense have not aged so well.
This is, in part, due to the fact that Shyamalan went from being a wunderkind to a self-parody in almost record time, thereby rendering certain uses of the filmmaker’s now-overdone tropes (e.g., the surprise ending, his brief role as a doctor, etc.) inadvertently comedic.
But it’s also because the movie really plays to the cheap seats. This is most distracting in moments such as the aforementioned scene where Malcolm listens and re-listens to an audio recording 57 times just to make sure that even the dumbest audience member gets it2…
…and the film’s opening scene, in which Malcolm’s behavior (trying to change the subject, suggesting hanging an award in the bathroom, etc.) tells us everything we need to know about his character (he’s hard on himself, focusing on his failures and not his successes, and he doesn’t care about recognition) before Anna needlessly lays everything out in dialogue…
The sole aspect of Anna’s monologue that’s actually important is when she says Malcolm put her second to his work, which we later see dramatized (and could thus be cut from the script).
Slightly less grating is a scene in which Lynn somehow just notices for the first time there is a weird gleam of light that appears in every photograph of her son ever taken. I understand the purpose of the scene - to let the audience know Cole isn’t crazy - but it really makes Lynn seem kinda stupid (especially because she doesn’t follow up on it), and it’s a testament to Toni Collette’s genius that the scene isn’t altogether laughable (Collette rightfully got an Oscar nomination for this movie).
The only reason these moments exists are to ensure that even the biggest, dumbest schmuck in the audience can follow the movie.
Such nitpickery aside, I maintain that The Sixth Sense remains a very fine film indeed. It’s truly a shame that Shyamalan never quite crawled out from under its shadow. Which is the other way The Sixth Sense is similar to The Matrix: its creators completely misunderstood why people loved it so much in the first place. Shyamalan has made other good movies in the years since, but he also made a lot of incredibly bad ones, and they universally feel like he’s just chasing the success of The Sixth Sense. I’m actually kind of shocked he hasn’t made a sequel called The Seventh Sense starring Ryan Gosling or Chris Pratt or whoever as the adult version of Cole.
Maybe I should stop typing now before I give Shyamalan any ideas.
The Class of 1999
Sadly, I can’t find this scene online.
My apologies for the low quality of this clip. It’s all I was able to find.