Director Snapshot: M. Night Shyamalan

Shyamalan suffered more than any other director in recent memory from a sort of one-hit-wonder syndrome, where his first film did phenomenally well both financially and critically, and his subsequent films failed to live up to expectations. This is not entirely due to his next ventures being crappy movies, even though some of them absolutely are, but rather that The Sixth Sense (1999) was just so damn good.

Unfortunately for Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense is a great film due mostly to factors other than him. Even on repeat viewings, once you know the big twist, it still holds up as a good film mainly due to three things that would come to define why his films are what they are: solid actors in the main roles (in this case Bruce Willis and Toni Collette), the work of the astoundingly talented cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, and a fantastic score by composer James Newton Howard.

What I did there was a bit of sleight of hand. I said his ‘first’ film did well. But that’s not actually the case. It’s just that everyone thinks The Sixth Sense was his first film because it’s the one that established him as a household name. He actually made two films prior to The Sixth Sense, Praying with Anger (1992) and Wide Awake (1998). If anyone is curious about where the tendency for Shyamalan to cast himself in his films came from, it started with his debut effort. He plays the lead role in Praying with Anger. It’s a terrible film. It’s self-indulgent, manipulative and in parts mind-numbingly boring. I’ll admit I never made it to the end. After a scene where the young Shyamalan stands up to a riotous mob by spouting clichéd moral platitudes, I just couldn’t take any more. I haven’t seen Wide Awake and, because it stars Rosie O’Donnell and the cover looks like Sister Act, I don’t plan to.

Anyway, following The Sixth Sense came Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth and The Visit.

Unbreakable and Signs are not fantastic cinema but they are far from awful, fared passably at the box office and with critics, but were far from huge commercial successes.

Some say Unbreakable (2000) is Shyamalan’s best work. I disagree. I thought it was a nice take on a superhero movie and is an original and well-made thriller, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to see it multiple times and I don’t think it outdoes The Sixth Sense or Signs.

Signs (2002) is incredibly underrated. It was helped enormously in a box office sense because it starred a pre-looney tunes Mel Gibson, who at that time was still pulling in audiences. I actually really enjoy Signs, in fact it’s one of only two of his films that I watch regularly enough to own (the other being The Sixth Sense). Shyamalan is not shy about the fact he borrows heavily from directors he admires. With Signs, believe it or not, he modelled his directorial style on Alfred Hitchcock. The result is a pretty damn decent thriller. It has a few nice jump scares (the glimpse of the alien standing on the barn roof is my favourite), but the major set piece towards the end where the aliens surround the house is just brilliantly done. We never see the aliens, we only hear them surrounding the house and trying to get inside. It’s wonderfully claustrophobic. Call the ending a deus-ex-machina if you will (in fact even Shyamalan himself readily admits it is), I had no problems with it whatsoever.

With The Village (2004), Shyamalan tried to replicate the success of The Sixth Sense by following the same basic formula – cast decent actors, spin a mysterious story, and end with a shock reveal. It sort of worked – the film did far better than Unbreakable but failed to live up to the commercial success of Signs. Is it a better film than either of those? No. But it’s not as terrible as some people say it is.

Still, when The Village sort of revived Shyamalan’s credibility he was given carte blanche to write, produce and direct his next film, but I bet the studio regretted that decision. Lady in the Water (2006) is a pretty terrible film. When a director has to resort to turning a bedtime story he tells his kids into his latest cinematic foray you know he’s struggling to come up with ideas. True to form, Shyamalan managed to rope a decent actor into the main role. Paul Giamatti is fine in the film, it’s a shame the story and supporting characters are so miserable. It’s a film that is suffering a massive identity crisis – it doesn’t seem to know what it is. It’s supposed to be a bed time story brought to life, but has these odd digressions where it attempts to be some kind of satire on thriller movie conventions and the genre itself. It doesn’t succeed at any of it.

Next was The Happening in 2008. It is touted by some as a wonderfully clever comment on government fear-mongering and the political atmosphere in America and globally at the time. It’s not. It’s a god-awful film. It is so awful in fact that the mere thought of rewatching it literally gave me heart palpitations. I wish I was kidding. Defenders of The Happening claim that people who hated the film did so because they failed to ‘get it’, or ‘missed the point’. Uh, no. I got it. It just didn’t do ‘it’ very well.

By the time The Last Airbender came out in 2010 I was seeing Shyamalan films more out of morbid curiosity than any real desire to witness his latest creations. When it comes to films I am an unashamed glutton for punishment, but with this one my limits were truly tested. Shyamalan takes a sophisticated, imaginative cartoon and manages to reduce it to one of the most insultingly moronic films of all time. Flashy 3D visual shit doesn’t for a moment distract from a condescending script, banal characters and a lack of imagination that is almost beyond comprehension given the source material. The end result is like taking a 30-year-old scotch and mixing it with a stale lime slurpee from the 7-Eleven.

Next came After Earth (2013), and saw Shyamalan plumb new depths of insultingly moronic. The word that most came to mind while watching this was ‘seriously?’ It is so jam-packed with plot holes, failed internal logic and atrocious acting I honestly cannot believe it saw the light of day. Whatever star-struck Will Smith fan in the studio greenlit this one should hang his head in shame. It’s one of those films that runs for less than two hours but feels like a goddamn eternity.

When After Earth failed to even come close to breaking even domestically, Shyamalan’s studio backing finally evaporated. He didn’t work for two years, and his next venture was directing the television miniseries Wayward Pines (I haven’t seen it).

He returned to film with The Visit in 2015. This was touted as his ‘return to form’, but very tellingly released straight-to-video, showing studios’ complete lack of confidence in his work generating worthwhile returns. I wouldn’t call it a return to form because I was never convinced Shyamalan had much form to begin with, but it’s not an awful film. It’s the formula again – interesting characters, mysterious story, big reveal. It works . . . but only just.

I think the haphazard but occasionally solid success Shyamalan’s films have enjoyed is in spite of, not because of him. I honestly don’t think he’s the wonderfully gifted director some claim he is, what I think is he’s just managed to get away with aping directors who are far better than he is. He’s been helped enormously by casting great actors in the lead roles (with obvious exceptions), his brilliant cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, and James Newton Howard, whose musical scores for Shyamalan films are far better than the films themselves. He’s apparently got a couple of films in the pipeline, but I can’t say I’ll be rushing out to buy tickets.

In a nutshell –

Best Film: Signs
Worst Film: It’s a tough choice, but I’ll go with After Earth