"The Sixth Sense" - seeing what we expect to see

For our last two Film Club meetings, with A Separation and Oldboy, we found ourselves talking about how satisfying it is to encounter films that resist tidy conclusions. Films that don’t feel obliged to reassure us. No neat moral resolutions, no Hollywood ending.  

In returning to Hollywood, it felt fitting to do so with a film that became famous precisely because of its ending.

I will endeavour to avoid spoilers in this blog as I was surprised to discover that, of the six of us who met to discuss the film, five had not watched it before and only one of them knew the ending. I first watched it on DVD in 2000. Like most people, I immediately watched it again. And I watched it twice for Film Club on consecutive days.

What revisiting The Sixth Sense reveals is that its greatest achievement may not be the famous twist at all.

When The Sixth Sense appeared in 1999, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan was almost unknown. Born in India and raised in Pennsylvania, where the film itself is set, he was only twenty-nine when it came out and his single previous studio film had lost money. Even more surprising, immediately before writing The Sixth Sense, he had written the screenplay for Stuart Little—hardly obvious preparation for reinventing the supernatural thriller.

Disney paid a reported $3 million for the script and, unusually, agreed to let Shyamalan direct it himself. It was considered such a risk that the executive who approved the deal reportedly lost his job.

The gamble paid off. Made for around $40 million, the film earned more than $670 million worldwide and became the second highest grossing film of 1999. And that’s because this is a film that people don't watch it once. It almost demands an immediate second viewing.

In 1999, Bruce Willis was synonymous with action heroes. Audiences knew him from Die Hard and Armageddon—full of swagger, wisecracks and impossible survival. Dr Malcolm Crowe is an entirely different character. Quiet. Sad. Withdrawn.

Perhaps one of the film's cleverest tricks is to use our assumptions against us. Because Bruce Willis is Bruce Willis, we think we understand what sort of film we're watching. That is also reflected in the archetypal tension-raising score used for the opening credits but never deployed thereafter. The movie quietly encourages us to make assumptions—and assumptions turn out to matter enormously.

Eleven-year-old Haley Joel Osment provides the emotional centre in a performance entirely worthy of the Oscar nomination it received. Cole isn't written as an unusually wise or irritatingly precocious movie child. He's frightened, lonely and exhausted.

Shyamalan reinforces this by repeatedly placing the camera at Cole's eye level. We don't simply watch his fear. We inhabit it. Rooms, adults and terrifying encounters are all experienced from the perspective of a child struggling to make sense of a world no one else seems to understand. Cole's transformation over the course of the film is beautifully judged. By the time he stands confidently on stage during the Sword in the Stone performance, he is no longer the isolated boy we met at the beginning.

And on repeat viewing we find ourselves paying more attention to Toni Collette's performance as Lynn, Cole’s mother. The film never overplays her struggles. We glimpse fear, frustration, exhaustion and love in fragments. There is anguish in the hospital scenes when nobody can explain what is happening to Cole, pain when he withdraws from her, and extraordinary tenderness in quieter moments, like their make-believe conversations and racing in the supermarket trolley. Brilliantly acted, several members agreed.

It’s the emotional heart that makes this a psychological thriller more than a horror film, which was a point closely debated at the meeting. Thrillers contain mysteries that demand revelation, and psychological thrillers achieve something more—they involve us emotionally. We know films manipulate us, but the best do so in ways that illuminate rather than simply shock. Certainly, there are moments of horror: the kitchen cupboards, the hanging bodies at school, the vomiting ghost girl. But Shyamalan is remarkably restrained. Long stretches are almost devoid of music to manipulate our response. Fear is constantly balanced by ordinary life—the school play, the comic sight of parents filming with oversized camcorders, quiet family scenes. The horror is never sustained for long.

And that's because the real terrors are human ones: Vincent Gray's despair; a divorced mother trying desperately to understand her troubled son; school bullying; isolation, misunderstanding and loneliness.

What makes the ending so remarkable is that the film doesn't really hide anything. What we see we explain away as we watch – the film persuades us to collaborate in misunderstanding it. We only see what we want to see.

Several members admired the plotting and one member noted how remarkable it is that such an intricately structured story was created specifically for the screen, not adapted from a novel.

Even the details reward repeat viewing. Red appears sparingly but significantly—the cellar doorknob, Anna's shawl, Cole's tent, the church door, the balloon, Lynn's nails, the tape recorder markers. Once noticed, the colour becomes impossible to ignore. Some members wondered whether green carries significance too. There always seems to be another layer.

One of the most interesting questions raised during the evening concerned the film's true protagonist. Is this Cole's story? Or Malcolm's?

Many argued that it is Malcolm's journey. Not simply because he learns the truth, but because his entire belief structure has to change. He must confront reality itself. The irony is that Cole reaches the truth long before Malcolm does. Malcolm believes he is helping the boy, but Cole has been helping Malcolm all along. His failure with Vincent Gray finds redemption through Cole.

By the end, there were some questions that lingered. Some wondered whether there had been studio interference or whether scenes had been left on the cutting-room floor. What about the boy with the gunshot wound? Could Vincent himself have sought resolution through Cole? Is there a director's cut somewhere?

Yet maybe the film's refusal to explain everything is part of its appeal. Unlike a loose ending, The Sixth Sense leaves us satisfied while preserving mystery. Another reason, perhaps, why it continues to endure.

This is a film to watch more than once. The first viewing is about the reveal. The second is about spotting what we missed. By the third, we begin to notice something else entirely: what are we failing to see in our own lives?

Twenty-seven years on, The Sixth Sense still asks the questions—and still makes us want to watch again.