The Sixth Sense

Sometimes, a single fact is all it takes to explain how bad a movie is. You know in the trailer for The Sixth Sense where the little kid says, "I talk to dead people"? That line comes an hour into the movie.

An hour.

In scriptwriting class, that line is what they call the premise: i.e., the idea the whole movie is based upon. Typically, action movies get the premise out of the way in the first five minutes or so ("Hey, there’s a bomb on this bus!"), while suspense thrillers, based as they are on the strategic withholding of information, get to wait a little longer. There’s no set rule for when the premise should be revealed, but here’s a hint: An hour into the movie is way, way too late. This is usually the kind of flaw a $20K-a-year script reader fresh out of college would spot, but somehow M. Night Shyamalan’s dreadful script made it all the way through to completion without anyone noticing how lumpy and ungainly it was.

As bad a writer as Shyamalan is, though, he’s far worse as a director. The movie opens with a shot of Olivia Williams going down to the basement to pick out a bottle of wine, and rather than leave any doubt as to the fact that the shot is supposed to be spooky, Shyamalan has Williams adopt a look that has more to do with deciding the fate of the free world than making the choice between Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Filmed from behind the wine rack — perhaps intended to suggest a supernatural presence, but it’s really just distracting — it’s a rather spectacularly ugly shot, particularly from the usually brilliant cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, who has lent a spectral gloss to such films as Beloved and Devil in a Blue Dress. But The Sixth Sense is one bad-looking movie — with murky lighting, ill-considered compositions and zero visual flair — a state of affairs that even the fact that it was shot in Philadelphia can’t dissipate.

Even though the location has almost nothing to do with the plot, Shyamalan loads The Sixth Sense with geographical references like he’s stumping for the tourist board. In the first scene, Willis and his wife (Williams, still recovering from the arduous decision-making process) are admiring a citation he, a child psychologist, has received from the mayor, and they read all the way through it, right down to the part where it says "of Philadelphia." When it comes time to introduce the film’s preteen hero, Cole (Haley Joel Osment), the film does so with a caption that reads not only "One year later," but also, pointlessly, "South Philadelphia." Now it’s great that Shyamalan, who grew up on the Main Line, is so bursting with civic pride that he wants to cram his movies full of local references, but in The Sixth Sense they’re so forced they actually start seeming a little bit pathetic, like a kid waiting to get picked for a team who keeps reminding people he’s still available. (The local setting does, however, provide the occasion for some small but particularly nice turns by local actors Janis Dardaris and Greg Wood.)

About the only reason it’s important that The Sixth Sense is set in Philadelphia is that it is, as a grade school history teacher helpfully reminds us, "one of the oldest cities in America," and thus home to a lot of dead people — which, in case you’ve forgotten, little Cole can see. In a way, it may be a good thing that the movie takes so long to reveal this, since the delay leaves you less time to realize that there’s nothing else to The Sixth Sense, apart from a trick ending and one decent scene between the boy and his mother (played by the misused Toni Collette). The entire plot of the movie goes like this: Boy sees dead people, boy is upset about seeing dead people, boy learns how to deal with seeing dead people. No plot twists, no complications, no nothing. It might take some kind of extrasensory perception to explain what fills The Sixth Sense’s 114 minutes, because I certainly can’t explain it. I know I sat in a movie theater for two hours, but I’ll be damned if I can tell you what happened.

Sam takes another look at The Sixth Sense.