The Plot Twist That Launched M. Night Shyamalan’s Career

Some directors achieve fame gradually, building recognition movie by movie, accruing bankable status over time. Others hit like a bolt of lightning, one great movie turning them into a household name virtually overnight.

M. Night Shyamalan falls into the latter category. The Philadelphia filmmaker owes his career and auteur reputation to The Sixth Sense, and particularly to the film’s third-act reveal, an audacious plot twist that has entered the cultural consciousness in a way few plot twists have. (If by some miracle you don’t know what the twist is, this is your warning not to read any further.) As the film gets a new 4K Blu-ray release this month — and as Shyamalan seems to be in full comeback mode with the success of his concert thriller Trap — it’s the right time to revisit his breakout hit.

Although Shyamalan had already made two little-seen movies before The Sixth Sense hit theaters in summer 1999, the ghost story/thriller hybrid launched his career beyond his wildest dreams. Centered around the relationship between a veteran child psychologist, Malcolm (Bruce Willis), and his new patient, a precocious boy named Cole who has the ability to see and communicate with ghosts (Haley Joel Osment), the film became the second highest-grossing movie of 1999 and a near-instant classic, establishing Shyamalan as the preeminent supernatural filmmaker of his generation.

What was it about this peculiar film that made it such a cultural sensation? Certainly, Shyamalan’s fusion of macabre elements with a troubled family drama and a touch of Ghost-esque romance proved potent. And Osment gives one of the best child performances of the ’90s, embodying the haunted, hyperaware Cole with a magnetic sensitivity. Not just any kid actor could have rendered “I see dead people” into one of the most instantly recognizable movie quotes of the late 20th century. (Surprisingly, that moment doesn’t arrive until the 50-minute mark, a whole world of character-building and atmosphere-setting in place before the film reveals Cole’s condition and its own supernatural stakes.)

The ghoulish fun of The Sixth Sense stems from the ever-shifting variety of ghosts Cole encounters—some friendly, some not, most displaying some gory signifier of their death. There’s the boy with the gaping head wound, offering to show Cole “where my dad keeps his gun,” the wrist-slashing housewife and the hanging victims in the school, and Cole’s own grandmother, sharing messages for his mother. There’s a carnival-esque unpredictability to the film’s inventive scares.

There’s also Kyra (a very young Mischa Barton), a ghost girl poisoned by her own mother in a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In a curious and dramatic interlude, which becomes a turning point in the film, Cole visits Kyra’s funeral reception and presents her father with video evidence of her murder, thereby saving her sister from the same fate.

The sequence offers a glimpse of a different, sleazier direction the film could have gone in which Cole goes around helping ghosts bring their killers to justice. Indeed, as recounted in Brian Raftery’s book Best. Movie. Year. Ever., an early version of the script, which Shyamalan described as “a rip-off of The Silence of the Lambs,” centered around a crime scene photographer and his son who has the ability to see serial-killer victims. Shyamalan wisely abandoned this focus.

Yet the Kyra sequence helps Cole realize he can help the ghosts who stalk him instead of fearing them. Of course, that includes Malcolm himself, a benevolent ghost, though he doesn’t yet know it, and neither does the audience, though the clues are all there. (The film opens with Malcolm being shot by a troubled former patient, later revealed to have had the same condition as Cole, misdiagnosed by Malcolm. Later, Cole tells Malcolm he sees dead people and that “they don’t know they’re dead” as the camera lingers on Malcolm’s worried face.) Only with Cole’s guidance is Malcolm able to say goodbye to his grieving wife and move on to some sort of afterlife.

Never a subtle filmmaker, Shyamalan can’t help but spoon-feed the big twist to the viewer in a flurry of emotional music swells and see-what-I-did-there flashbacks, revisiting pivotal moments with new knowledge as a stunned Malcolm practically stumbles over in shock. It’s the kind of ending that’s designed to make sure every viewer in the house understands exactly what’s being revealed.

Still, it’s an ingenious twist, not least because it turns The Sixth Sense into a kind of cinematic paraprosdokian, a joke in which the latter part of the sentence changes the meaning of the first. The film’s big reveal changes the meaning of everything that’s come before. Malcolm isn’t dealing with marital problems and a distant wife who won’t talk to him; he’s dead! She’s not ignoring him during their anniversary dinner; she’s grieving by herself. He moves through the world of the living like a ghost because he is one. What Malcolm (and, by extension, the viewer) perceives to be icy silence is actually obliviousness.

Shyamalan’s trick is so audacious that it seems obvious upon rewatch. After the opening scene, Cole is the only character who has a real conversation with Malcolm. In the scenes where others seem to be interacting with Malcolm, they’re actually alone. The cleverest example is the scene where Cole comes home from school to find his mom (Toni Collette) and Malcolm sitting across from each other in the living room. The opening shot implies that they’ve been talking about him, but upon rewatch, you realize that no words are ever exchanged between them.

Are there holes here? Sure. We’re meant to believe that Malcolm went months without noticing that nobody seemed to hear anything he said? He didn’t hear his wife talking about him in the past tense? And how come he’s not bloody and visibly wounded like all those other ghosts Cole sees? (As a workaround, Shyamalan has him outfitted throughout the film in the same clothes he wore on the night of his death—a sweater, an overcoat—with the implication that they’re covering up his bullet wound.)

Ah, but it’s a movie, and Cole’s observation that the dead “only see what they want to see” provides an awful lot of narrative license. It’s the best kind of twist, the kind that takes a first-time viewer by surprise but where the hints seem obvious upon rewatch. Indeed, some of the initial success of The Sixth Sense can surely be attributed to returning moviegoers going back to catch what they missed; the critic Craig Nash recently recalled that he saw it four times during its theatrical run.

For better or worse, the ending of The Sixth Sense immediately penetrated the popular consciousness, becoming familiar even to people who never saw the film, and inaugurated our current era of “spoiler culture.” It also landed Shyamalan a reputation for delivering surprise twists, a reputation he made good on in subsequent hits like Signs (2002) and the more recent comeback vehicle Old (2021), but which has also curdled into self-parody (The Village). He’s often cheesy, and guilty of writing terrible dialogue, but the man is undeniably an auteur with a vision of his own. (And with the downright goofy Trap, he finally made a Silence of the Lambs-inspired serial killer flick!)

To the extent that Shyamalan has a flourishing career today—and the surprising success of Knock at the Cabin and Trap prove he does — he owes it to the last 10 minutes of The Sixth Sense. With one mighty twist, he ended a movie and began a career.