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The Sixth Sense More at IMDbPro »

The meaning of supernatural thriller is completely re-written by M. Night Shyamalan with the stunningly encompassing Sixth Sense., 9 September 2000

Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

M. Night Shyamalan returns to directing for his second effort after the disappointing Wide Awake, which he directed for release in 1998. His second film, The Sixth Sense, was a staggering success that rocketed Shyamalan to the very top of the filmmaking world. Bruce Willis plays Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who takes on the excessively challenging task of helping young Cole Sear (played with amazing skill by Haley Joel Osment), a boy who is cursed with the ability to see dead people.

Complicating the plot is the fact that Malcolm once had a young boy as a patient with the same problem, and he was unable to help him, and he is now afraid that the same thing will happen with Cole.

Every individual scene in The Sixth Sense is saturated with cinematic trickery, giving even the liveliest settings, a birthday party for example, a strikingly eerie feel. Because of that, even though the film is not non-stop relentless thrills and scares, it never lets the audience relax, which is one of the main things that make it such a good movie. Besides that, not only does the film avoid excessive gore and tasteless violence, it also provides the perfect premise for presenting the small amount of gore that it does contain. Cole is able to see people who are dead, and naturally he sees them as they look when they died. This provides for some seriously scary moments, such as when he is using the bathroom in the middle of the night and the woman walks by the doorway. Very simple, but coupled with the startling sound effects at that moment, this is one of the scariest scenes seen in movies in recent years.

The Sixth Sense had a incredibly imaginative and original story, and it was presented with great skill. It has a certain quality that very few movies of this type have. Most movies try to keep the audience guessing (Wild Things), but in The Sixth Sense, the audience doesn't even know that something is amiss. Before the breathtaking plot twist, the ending is not even considered as a possibility. However, once the ending is realized, a number of questions begin to arise. (spoiler) How could Malcolm have lived for so long as a dead person without noticing anything strange? Wouldn't it seem strange to him that no one was able to see him since that one night when he got shot by his former patient? He couldn't possibly interact with anyone in the world of the living. And even if he could, why didn't his fiancee acknowledge him at the restaurant? I mean, assuming that he doesn't know he's dead. Questions like this are usually inevitable with a movie like The Sixth Sense, and I think that they could have been answered if the film would have gone into how it's possible for these people not to know that they are dead, even though the back of their head is blown out, or half of the skin on their face has been burned off. Do they just perceive everything as being normal? I don't know, but either way, despite trivial shortcomings like this, The Sixth Sense is a groundbreaking supernatural thriller, and you see something new in it every time you watch it. That's a rare quality that not many movies have. Don't miss this one.

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