In Speilberg's Always, the dead hang around for awhile, tying up the loose ends of their lives. In Jacob's Ladder, the dead hang around in a similar manner, having to make peace before they can move on. Ditto with Beetlejuice, High Plains Drifter, Ghost, etc. It's all about preparation. In that regard the The Sixth Sense is no different. There's even a brilliant little thematic moment where a red balloon is released in a staircase. It climbs, climbs, rising steadily away from the party, and then finally comes to rest against the ceiling, unable to go any higher. Yet. It's no accident either that director/writer M. Night Shyamalan has the young Cole (Haley Joel Osment) be the only one aware of this balloon. He can, after all, see the dead, who are similarly trapped. But of course he doesn't tell people this. Until child psychologist Malcolm (pay-attention-to-the-name) Crowe (Bruce Willis) enters his life. The deal with Crowe is that he feels he once failed to reach a similarly tortured patient, and his failure led to the tragedy which the movie opens with: that former patient breaking into Crowe's home for some impromptu therapy. The Sixth Sense is set a year after that tragic session, but Crowe is hardly over it. During that year of ostensible convalescence--both psychological and physical--his marriage has fallen quietly apart, to the point where he and his wife no longer talk. If he can only help this Cole, maybe everything will be all right again. So for Crowe, it's about redemption. For Cole, however, it's about making it down the hall to the bathroom at night, an acute terror we feel with him, although at that point there's yet to be anything supernatural on-screen. But when it comes, hold on. Remember about 45 minutes into Exorcist III, where an unannounced nun with some cadaver tool floats silently across the hall, in the background? One of the single scariest moments in moviedom, for the simple reason that, 45 minutes into it, the tension level is so high that the slightest thing can release it all at once. M. Night Shyamalan understands this thoroughly, and handles his 'manifestations' with a steady hand. He never crowds a room with them, but chooses instead to simply reflect them in a child's reaction shots. It's not so much that they're out of the frame, though, as with The Blair Witch Project. It's that they're locked into Cole's point-of-view, thus inaccessible, or, only accessible when dramatically effective, which drains a little off the illusion of reality any horror film depends upon. In Shyamalan's defense, though, perhaps he delayed putting Cole's 'sixth sense' on-screen simply because he wants us to know the viewer before the viewed. Otherwise Cole might get upstaged. All minor issues aside though, what stands out is how Shyamalan leads us to believe that the dramatic line is lifted directly from Good Will Hunting: the therapist and the patient both depending on each other for a cure. And in a sense this is the dramatic line, but in the final moments, in what's already looking like a typical Hollywood epilogue, it's recast in an unconventional light. One that makes you reconcieve the whole movie, much as Arlington Road did. Much as Jacob's Ladder did. The real surprise, though, is that The Sixth Sense owes more to Always than to Jacob's Ladder. The dual-epiphanies Cole and Crowe eventually achieve--tying together subplots which seemed incidental but were in fact pivotal--make you appreciate the darkened theater. People can't see your eyes without lights. But then they're misty too: The Sixth Sense is a horror movie with an unexpected love story embedded in it. Prepare. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
for more like this, check out http://www.cinemuck.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews