Now I've Seen Everything, Dept.: M. Night Shyamalan

Straight Up...with a Twist

Manoj Nelliyatu Shyamalan was born August 6th, 1970 in Mahé, Pondicherry, India, as his mother moved back there to be with family during her pregnancy. The family was living in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, where the director was raised, attending a private Catholic school, Waldron Mercy Elementary for Boys ("for the discipline"), and in his spare time shooting 8mm movies, not unlike his idol, Steven Spielberg. While attending film school at NYU, he made his first film, Praying with Anger, financed by family and friends, and written, produced, directed and starring himself. It was his third film, The Sixth Sense, that propelled him into the A-list category, becoming the surprise hit of the Summer (mostly by audience word of mouth) and garnering six Academy award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Heady stuff for a beginning director's third film, and especially for a genre picture, usually ignored by the Oscars.  

The Sixth Sense was, as was the ability in the movie, both blessing and curse. Night was suddenly a hot commodity, but his skill-sets ran towards "bubble" films, limited in scope, and deeply personal. He could never be accused of going for the "blockbuster" audience, and until The Last Airbender, he didn't try. If one thing unites his body of work, it is that all of his heroes are tasked with a mission, with which they struggle, and from which they learn important life-lessons. He has also suffered from expectations of what "his" films should be, but has shown signs that he's willing to break those ideas in order to expand his craft.

Praying with Anger (1992) Shyamalan wrote, produced, directed and starred in his first film, which puts him in the same multi-hyphenate-league as Orson Welles. His ambitions, however, were far less those on Welles. The story is about a young man of Indian heritage (Shyamalan cast himself) raised in the States, who travels to his homeland and must come to grips with the country and its culture. He comes away, not with a feeling of home-coming, but of belonging nowhere, being different in both countries, and apart. It may be largely auto-biographical as the director made his own pilgrimage there earlier, then went back to make this film, but one shouldn't read too much into the particulars of the story and more on the feelings generated by such an experience. It's rough, but not bad for a student film while still in college. It would be six years before he got his big break.

Wide Awake (1998) "Catholic school is a lot like prison" says young Joshua A. Beal (Joseph Cross) of the Waldron Mercy Academy for Boys. He's on a mission. Not FOR God. But to find him. Not even an alt.news.com search can locate him. "Can we skip the confession stuff?" he asks a priest (Dan Lauria) "Can we just talk?" The crisis of faith—that causes a ritualistic morning catatonia to delay going to school—comes from the death of his grandfather (Robert Loggia). "A lot of people do what you're doing" says Sister Josephine (Rosie O'Donnell) "but they usually finish grammar school first." This one is decidedly auto-biographical, too, one expects (Night went to the very school where it was filmed), but what reads as a cloying synopsis is, instead, refreshingly light and fanciful for most of its length (excepting a too on-the-nose finale that feels a bit desperate for closure...and rather interestingly could serve as a pilot-light for his next film), with an odd "Peanuts"-like quality where kids talk like adults...and the adults (like Denis Leary and Dana Delaney) are largely non-participatory and confused. Don't let the poster fool you—O'Donnell isn't in it that much, and until the very end, it's quite fun.

The Sixth Sense (1999) Box office sensation that came out of nowhere and lifted the Summer 1999 box-office doldrums of the under-performing The Phantom Menace and Eyes Wide Shut. No one was expecting this film would be the hit it became, but it effectively revived Bruce Willis' stalled career, made stars of Toni Collette and Haley Joel Osment (another great child performance the director inspires), and made Shyamalan the latest story-telling wunderkint. Not that he really did anything different from a standard "Twilight Zone" episode. It's just that he managed to keep it afloat for two solid hours through sheer directorial sleight-of-hand, then had the brass to go back at the end and show you how he did it. Willis plays a psychologist, whose latest concern is a young boy who sees "dead people...everywhere." His efforts to help the beset child is a bit of a diversion (perhaps too much) from his seemingly-crumbling marriage, where things are a little...distant. For him, the kid is an obsession, and for the kid, what starts out as fear, we soon learn is a mission...to serve as a conduit between the living and the dead to tie up loose ends. The case provides an epiphany for Willis' shrink that you don't see coming and the palpable creepiness that Shyamalan infuses the story with, makes it a superior, even optimistic, horror film, something quite unique and commendably different.

Unbreakable (2000) Given the notice given to the success of The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan was given a bit freer reign and more budget on his next film, which is his "take" on the superhero origin story, but without the capes and spandex. Willis' character David Dunn survives a horrific train-crash that kills everyone but him, and it slowly dawns on him that there might be a reason—he's indestructible and super-humanly strong, and the revelation takes him on a path of self-discovery about his own potential for doing good, as opposed to just getting by. As with most of Shyamalan's movies, Dunn finds himself caught between finding his predestined purpose in life, and the uncomfortable burden it imposes. Every superhero needs an antagonist (it's partially the point of the movie) and Samuel L. Jackson plays his exact opposite, a brittle comic-art dealer, who'll break a bone if you look at him funny. Slow-moving and deliberate with a sense of inevitable foreboding, Unbreakable is a more down-to-Earth spin on the pop-myth-making of comics. In fact, myth-making is a lot of what the movie is concerned with. It didn't do too well at the box-office, but I found it a breath of fresh air in a movie environment that was becoming crowded with super-hero stories that already seemed a bit too similar.

Signs (2002) The aliens are attacking and this time it's personal. Shyamalan manged to keep the budget down by taking out anything more than the local perspective—the alien attacks happen in the background, broadcast on TV—and in fact, Shyamalan really didn't give a rip what the aliens looked like or what they were doing here. No, his interest was how this threat from the Heavens would affect a man of faith who'd lost it through tragedy (elements explored in Wide Awake). Mel Gibson plays a former minister, Graham Hess, a widower, with two oddly precocious kids (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin), and a brother (Joaquin Phoenix), whose better days are behind him, and they run a family farm. One morning, mysterious crop circles in their corn-fields without any explanation. Eventually, they realize that Earth is being invaded by aliens and that those crop-circles are navigation markers for the attackers. They barricade themselves in the farm-house, suspecting that the markers will attract the aliens to them, and prepare themselves for what looks like the end of the world. That the story is small-scale, sparse, intimate, and even funny, works to the film's advantage, because, really, what hasn't been done in an alien invasion story before? Eventually, everything gets tied up in a neat little bundle, but it's part of the Shyamalan schema of pre-destination and purpose realized, and the small cast...Gibson, Phoenix, Culkin, and Breslin...is uniformly great.

The Village (2004) Clever story, with some very nice intricacies, a good cast (Brendan Gleeson, Joaquin Phoenix again, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt and with a standout first starring performance by Bryce Dallas Howard), about the isolated community of Covington, Pennsylvania that has a secret pact with the violent creatures in the woods surrounding them—none of the villagers will venture beyond their borders, and none of the creatures will invade the village. Howard plays a blind villager who undertakes a desperate mission to venture beyond the woods to get medical supplies for her wounded fiancee (Phoenix), but despite the fine finishes, the movie has one problem—its director is M. Night Shyamalan, who'd just directed three movies with "twist" endings. So when this one came out, everybody expected it. The story, about an ancient village, with very specific rules about not leaving the forest walls lest you be eaten is a fine grim fairy tale, but unfortunately, the villager had made one trip to the well too many—and the audience was way ahead of the game. Shyamalan had lost the audience's respect (seemingly because he kept trying to pull the same trick over and over again, although that "reveal" may have been the least of his concerns), but his next film, he changed tactics, starting to build enormous puzzles—letting the audience in on his pre-production process—and found a clever hook to hang his story on.

Lady in the Water (2006) After "going to the well" of the twist ending too many times, this odd little fantasy about a sea-nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard again) found in the drainage of a condominium swimming pool is refreshingly straight-forward and quirky, with a good cast—Paul Giamatti, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright, Mary Beth Hurt—but two of the characters, Balaban's cluelessly arrogant film critic and a visionary writer (played by Shyamalan himself) rankle, and makes one wonder if the writer-director might be getting a bit of a swelled head after the drubbing that The Village got from critics (and audiences stayed home). Still, after the sameness of structure his previous four films exhibited, the slightly bent children's fantasy set in a world of blase adults needing to fulfill a complicated quest to do some good in the world seemed a breath of fresh air. It's as twee as hell, which, if it had been animated, might have set better with audiences. As it is, just the idea of Paul Giamatti in the traditional handsome prince role makes me happy.

The Happening (2008) There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. For one, people are committing suicide by jumping off buildings. Nature seems to be turning itself inside out to drive people insane and kill themselves. Science teacher Mark Wahlberg takes his wife Zooey Deschanel to the country to try to escape whatever it is that's going on that's making people act crazy. It could very well be this movie, because Shyamalan is a bit vague about what is "happening," but evidently it has something to do with the wind and a toxin being atomized by vegetation (so—of course—head for the country). Nothing is explained, little is resolved, except on a personal level. In fact, the movie is so obtuse, it might very well be the director's version of Hitchcock's The Birds, but the film has little of that film's sense of dread or helplessness in the face of the natural world turning against humanity. One could search for deeper meanings, but it doesn't feel worth trying, given the film's meager accomplishments. Wahlberg and Deschanel try, but ultimately they're at a loss to make the material rise above what is, essentially, a vaporous concept.  Another thing: there are some very clumsy shot set-ups and editorial decisions here that might be explained by circumstances on-set—I'm speaking of the early classroom scenes—but, some of the shots just don't communicate with each other, editorially. Given what he'd done before, with such a sure hand, one began wondering if Shyamalan was paying attention. 

"I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me..."

The Last Airbender (2010) Nickelodeon's popular cartoon "Avatar" got the live-action treatment from Shyamalan, (but without the name, as James Cameron got there first) and the result, while starting promisingly, soon bogs down into incomprehensible battles of the elements that are sloppily staged, and dodgily edited. It might have been a case of making do with non-delivered special effects, but this, along with a couple of mis-matched shots in The Happening, lends suspicion that sometimes Shyamalan doesn't plan things out very well. Certainly, given his previous films, with their tightly controlled sets, and limited world-views, this one, given its scope, sets and reliance on elaborate special effects may have been a bit beyond the director's strengths, which have a lot to do with atmosphere, pacing and directing actors, none of which appeared to be relevant to this film. 

After Earth (2013) A thousand years into the future humans are living on their settled planet of choice, Nova Prime, but are attacked by an invasionary S'krell force that use predatory creatures named Ursas to hunt down humans by smelling their fear. One member of the defending Ranger force, Cypher Raige (Will Smith) has learned to fight the Ursas by a technique called "ghosting" that eliminates fear, rendering humans invisible to the creatures. Raige's son, Kitai (Jaden Smith) aspires to be just like his legendary Dad, but given the father's suppression techniques—and his long absences—their relationship is very strained. After being drummed out of Ranger training for his youth and recklessness, it's decided that son accompany father on his last recce, when their ship is crippled by an asteroid storm and they are forced to abandon ship on a Class 1 Quarantined planet—the planet Earth, long abandoned by humankind after its environmental destruction. How thematically convenient. The ship is destroyed, its homing beacon inoperable, and everybody's dead except for the Raige's, and Dad has both his legs broken. So, it's up to Kitai to find the back-up beacon in a broken-off piece of the ship several kilometers away. But, he has to fight off creatures and toxins, volcano's and freezing nights to do so...AND there's one of those pesky Ursas that the ship was carrying and has escaped in the crash. After Earth got hammered by critics who likened it to the despised Battlefield Earth, the Scientology-backed adaptation of the L. Ron Hubbard book, and there is some of that there...but the "Fear is a Mind-killer" idea goes back to a good sci-fi writer, Frank Herbert, and even the Bible—"Yay, though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of Death..."—portrays fear as the brain's off-switch. Still, just because it may be too dianetic for some, that's not enough reason to hate the movie...so it provides plenty of other reasons, mostly having to do with both Smith's performances—it was their production, after all—so Shyamalan can't do much but try and "gee-whiz" the bee-jesus out the movie, but it doesn't distract from some of the luckiest breaks a kid ever got trying to survive in the wilderness. It even sums itself up with this father-son exchange: Kitai:"That sucked." Cypher: "That is correct."

The Visit (2015) After After Earth had its apocalypse at the box office, Shyamalan retreated and went back to his roots. His next film, which he financed himself with low-budget horror house Blumhouse, is as simple as a creepy story one tells around a camp-fire. Two kids, encouraging their Mother to have a romantic getaway, volunteer to go to their grandparents' house for a week-long visit, in an effort to try and heal the 15 year rift between the older generations, when Mom walked out to marry the man who would become their Father. They're just trying to help Mom out. Well, God helps those who help themselves.

The week starts out awkwardly, as when strangers are thrown together—and then, things get weird. "Nana" (Deanna Dunagan) is prone to forgetfulness and wandering around the house at night, growling. This is attributed to "sundowning." But, that doesn't explain the bursts of paranoia from "Pop-pop" (Peter McRobbie)—he attacks a stranger on the street because he thinks he's being followed, and he spends an awful lot of time out at the chicken coop where, oddly, there are no chickens.

Shyamalan films everything as a found-footage documentary being made by elder daughter Decca (Olivia DeJonge) and her little brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) of their trip so they can show their Mom (Katheryn Hahn) to help with the healing process. But, before long, the kids start to realize what they're actually doing is gathering evidence. It's a solid little conceit that Shyamalan scrupulously adheres to (with the exception of some atmospheric night shots) and, for once, the "twist" is earned, and doesn't seem much of a twist, just a confirmation of worst nightmares, which is the very heart and soul of effective horror.

Split (2016) If the limitations of the "found-footage" nature 
of The Visit re-invigorated Shyamalan, his next film took the limitations even farther and the concepts grander in this "Saw"-inspired step into the horror genre. Split is the story of a DID-afflicted killer, Kevin Wendell Crumb (an astonishingly mercurial James McAvoy), who abducts three random girls—but not so random, as he'd been stalking privileged "sleepers" and got a surprise in the bargain that "one of these things don't belong with the others"—in preparation for the arrival of a slowly emerging 24th personality, whose mission is not merely to protect its host, but to advance the evolution of man. That incarnation—"The Beast"—is talked about a lot in the 48 or so hours that the film takes place in, but the emerging pay-off this time is a success. Betty Buckley plays another of Shymalan's experts whose knowledge does them no good whatsoever, and, as the kidnap-victim with whom "The Beast" meets his match, Anna Taylor-Joy is a real-find (and probably Tim Burton's latest "go-to" wide-eyed girl). The scenario is as spare as Kevin's holding-cells, but Shyamalan's directorial sense has never been as deep. One wonders if the film would be as good without McAvoy (doubtful), but it's an astonishing, troubling work that builds from creepy unease to outright dread without any let-up. It's clever coda sets up a sequel to not one, but two of Shyamalan's movies.

Glass (2019) Glass had a built-in audience—everybody who had a high regard for Unbreakable and those who enjoyed Split—as Shyamalan engineered a meeting between the principles of those movies in one film, a sort of (using the Marvel Comics blurb-line) "When Titans Clash." Well, they don't so much clash here, as much as dance around each other in anticipation of a climax that is talked about a lot, but, when things start happening, no one gets out of the parking lot...literally. And the secondary characters are the only ones left alive. Bummer. Bound to be disappointing for that built-in audience. And Glass is a disappointing conclusion to all stories if one had an interest in those characters.

The issue is that Shyamalan made his super-whatever's a Secret Society, one that could de-stabilize the world of Normals (or "Muggles" if you want recall the same oppressed-minority-thing of J. K. Rowling's "Potter-verse," just as "Mutants" are feared in the Marvel-verse and "Metahumans," seen suspiciously in the verse of DC Comics) if The Truth came out. Thus, somebody needs to suppress it. Thus, there has to be a Secret Society to do that. Thus, there are a lot of conspiracies going around in a world of internet, cell-phones, and social media. The Truth will come out whether you suppress it or not (although Shyamalan pretends that it wouldn't because he can pick time-frames—like thirteen years between movies—where nobody seems to see what's going on). The issue is whether people will believe it or not, no matter the source of the information (which Shyamalan totally ignores). That skepticism is what keeps Secret Societies secret, whether they remain a secret or not. It's the sort Shyamalanian myopia that keeps Glass from being a hit, and more Myth.

Old (2021) If one wanted to be snarky about it, one could most closely describe Old as "life's a beach and then you die."

 

A separating couple, the Kapas (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps) decide to take their two kids to a swank resort for one last family vacation before they start procedures for a divorce. If that was the plan, they couldn't have gone to a better place. A resort outing to a private beach starts to have unforseen consequences, as the Kapas and the other two groups on the beach start to age. It's first apparent in the kids, who, in the course of hours become teenagers. Then, the eldest of the group dies, as does the companion of another. They begin to realize that they're aging a year every 30 minutes they're on the beach. Every adult has some medical condition, which only causes them to succumb to it earlier, except for the one who has multiple sclerosis. 

 

So, get off the beach, I hear you advise. Trouble is anybody attempting it gets a throbbing headache, passes out and winds up on the beach again (how is this accomplished with so many witnesses? "Editing.") Things get increasingly surreal at an elevated pace as wounds quickly heal and one of the children-turned-teens has an accelerated pregnancy and gives birth—kids grow up fast these days.

 

The French graphic novel on which this is based leaves it all a mystery, but Night provides a solution—Big Pharma—that is not exactly satisfying, and, is, in fact, a little bit ludicrous when you consider the insurance burdens on resorts. It's a nice set-up, but as things lurch more out of control, one suspects a big con—a film contemplating themes but with a structural spine that feels like an after-thought (not too far afield, actually, from creating a resort in order to conduct medical tests).

 

Oh, one more glib summation: "It hasn't aged well."

Knock at the Cabin (2023) So, a family is having a lovely vacation in a lovely cabin in the lovely woods. Then four strangers carrying weapons knock on your door and want to be let in...to talk. Being practical...and sane...they kindly refuse (ya know...weapons), but the four break in anyway and tie up the adults, leaving the seven year old child around to listen to the whole thing. The spokesman, Leonard (Dave Bautista) says that—although he's tied them up—he doesn't want to hurt them. BUT...he's had a vision. So have the other three. Those separate visions all entail this particular cabin in the woods and a mission: to save the world from rising oceans, pandemic, and a falling sky—an apocalypse. Leonard tells them that to prevent all of these disasters, one of the family will have to die...they can choose who.

 

For the family, Andrew (Ben Aldridge), Eric (Jonathan Groff) and little Wen (Kristen Cui) (and basically everybody else), this is nuts. I mean, if Richard Dreyfuss came in the house and said that aliens were coming, would you believe him? Not even if he was making mountains out of mashed potatoes! But, this... from these four...is even more extreme. The family refuses to entertain even the slightest suggestion that they will harm themselves and look for another explanation—the four have gone crazy, maybe, or they have a deep-rooted bias against gay couples, or...one of them looks like he picked a fight with Eric in a bar. Those visions can't be real, right? Right?

 

Based on "The Cabin at the End of the World," Night makes a tense film about Truth, Belief, and Faith, and making each one look like a fool's errand. And it's hard not to sympathize when the real world is infested with a growing population of conspiracy theorists or "bad actors" just trying to mess with reality. Knock at the Cabin has good actors, though, and although there's a weird sort of snake-eating-its-own-tail quality to it, it's a solid thriller.

Trap (2024) Coming out at a time when Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are making considerable livings (and headlines) from their seemingly endless world-concert-tours, Night's Trap—about a serial killer (Josh Hartnett) taking his daughter to a sold-out concert by her favorite artist, only to find that the event is a massive stake-out by the police and FBI to trap him...or, rather the serial killer they only know as "The Butcher."

 

It could be the basis of a horror-comedy, but Night plays it straight, showing a sociopath—who's already trapped in a split-identity between killer and family-man—trying to negotiate both halves in trying to avoid a dragnet that will out him, something he's trying to avoid at all costs.

 

It's a nice little bubble-world Night creates—one that's capable of popping any second—and there's the added bonus that he cast his own daughter as the star of the concert (and, she's very good!), plus you get a lot of good performances, but a surprisingly expert one from Hartnett, who manages to allow you to read every emotion and thought in his head, but still keeps you guessing.