There are only a few film directors working in Hollywood whose names can be used as shorthand. You say Michael Bay and you know you’re getting chaotic explosions. Christopher Nolan delights in mind-scrambling manipulations of time. And M. Night Shyamalan, perhaps most famously of all, will forever be known as the guy with the twist endings. And while a revelatory “aha!” in the final scene is something that happens in most (but not all) of Shyamalan’s movies, that carny-style move isn’t his only authorial stamp. For 25 years, Shyamalan has been doing something hardly few would dare to try in wide-release, thrill-ride cinema. He’s maintained a philosophy of heart-on-sleeve earnestness, a sincerity surrounding existential issues rarely seen outside a hospital or house of worship. You buy a ticket to a horror movie, you get theology. How’s that for a twist?
To understand Shyamalan—still best known for his three-in-a-row run of The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002), and in theaters now with the extremely entertaining Trap—it’s good to know his origins, as well as some details about his seldom-seen early work.
The writer-director-producer was born Manoj (that’s what the “M.” stands for) Shyamalan in Pondicherry, India, in 1970. Both parents were physicians, and the family, including an older sister, settled in the Philadelphia suburbs when Manoj was still an infant. He was raised Hindu but attended Catholic school, an outsider’s position that fueled his investigative, questioning nature. As a child he became enamored of Native American history, and, when studying the Lakota language, was drawn to a word that translated to “night”; he added that name to his own. Seeing Star Wars at the age of 7 led to a love of shooting home movies, and eventually attending New York University’s film school—not studying medicine as his father wished.
While a student he completed the feature-length film Praying with Anger, in which the young Shyamalan himself stars as an Indian-American exchange student in the land of his roots, trying to navigate a sense of identity. For a student film, it is impressive, but it’s hard to recommend for reasons other than searching for seeds of the director’s later work. Early on, his character tells a friend that he rejected religion once he realized that no matter how hard he prayed, it wouldn’t affect the scores of his favorite football team. Repeated culture clashes cast something of a jaundiced view on India, but this is balanced by moments of awe during visits to Hindu temples. At the climax, the student summons a strength he didn’t know he had to halt a mob from killing a Muslim.
Not long after Praying with Anger, Shyamalan completed the religious comedy Wide Awake, another semi-autobiographical small film. In it, a wide-eyed, philosophical boy (Joseph Cross) with physician parents and an older sister living in the Philadelphia suburbs attends a Catholic school and can’t stop causing lighthearted grief for the nuns (Rosie O’Donnell and Camryn Manheim!) with his constant questions. Early on, he is thunderstruck to learn that anyone who isn’t baptized will be sent to hell, a moment Shyamalan still recalls from his youth.
Grieving the death of his grandfather, our young protagonist sets out on a mission to somehow meet God and lob him a few basic questions. At only 88 minutes, Wide Awake tries to walk a line between Thomas Mann and Home Alone and is far too corny to really work. At the very end, however, there is a little twist (God was with us all along, you’ll be happy to know), which unlocked the door for Shyamalan’s future success. A dash of fantasy (or the supernatural) will be a hallmark going forward and lead to one of the most impressive careers in Hollywood.
A year after Wide Awake’s release (though the movie had been completed for some time), summer audiences sank their teeth into The Sixth Sense, a money-making juggernaut that dominated the cultural conversation and was nominated for six Academy Awards. It, too, is about a young boy in Philadelphia attending Catholic school and working through enormous issues. His is less a case of premature weltschmerz and instead is about the trouble that comes from being able to communicate with the dead. (Specifically, dead people who were killed in rotten ways and are still milling about the Delaware Valley with some sort of task that needs doing.) This would be a problem for anyone, but especially a sensitive young lad who just wants someone, mostly his mother, to believe him.
As you likely know, the child psychologist dispatched to help him (Bruce Willis) turns out to be a ghost himself, which he (and we in the audience) do not realize until the conclusion—which sent many to tell friends “you need to see this movie; you won’t believe how it ends” and also back to the ticket booth for a second viewing, to make sure it all added up. Watching it years later, already aware of the big finish, I was much more taken with the penultimate scene. Before Willis has his final reveal, the young boy (Haley Joel Osment) finally opens up to his mother (Toni Collette) and offers just enough “proof” that he maybe isn’t a head case after all. If you come to this emotional scene in the car with your guard down, you’ll find the exchange to be incredibly powerful. Putting aside plot specifics, it’s a moment in which two people who are terrified of the enormity of existence accept that the only weapon they have against fear is love.
It’s a raw kind of emotion—one reserved for a person’s most private encounters, not the middle of a mainstream suspense thriller—and Shyamalan effectively duplicated it in his alien invasion thriller, Signs.
In Signs, Mel Gibson plays a farmer and former preacher grieving the sudden (and gruesome) death of his wife. When it looks like the world is about to be conquered by asparagus-looking visitors from outer space, Gibson confesses to his younger brother (Joaquin Phoenix) that every drop of his faith has been dried up. The night before he and his family, including Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, expect to die, he fails as a father when he is unable to offer even a shred of hope. Faced with this ultimate absence, he reaches out for a group embrace, and everyone sobs.
Here’s where I’ll mention that Signs is actually rousing and action-packed and has a great many funny scenes, as well as suspenseful sequences that would make Alfred Hitchcock tense. But its foundation is this: When the time comes, can any of us make sense of the enormity of existence, not just to their family, but to ourselves? People forget that Signs, too, has a twist ending. The final frame shows Gibson putting his collar back on. At the end of the ordeal, he has returned to God.
Between The Sixth Sense and Signs came another big hit, Unbreakable, a movie that foresaw comic-book-movie mania in its content but not in form. Its twist (apart from an actual character switcheroo at the end) was that it wasn’t a supernatural movie like The Sixth Sense, but a superhero origin story. It stars Bruce Willis as a working-class security guard who is the sole survivor of a deadly train derailment. Turns out he is invincible, but other than that (and a few other subtle tweaks of reality), everything about the world of Unbreakable is as realistic as ours.
Taking that approach—and limiting itself to just one or two pleasurable sequences of vigilante justice—the movie offers itself plenty of time for Willis (and, wouldn’t you know, his young and highly sensitive son) to ask big questions like “why me?” The lasting image of the film is a melancholy Willis finally accepting his unbelievable fate.
At the kitchen table, father and son make tearful eye contact and agree to keep the mixed blessing between them. Yes, yes, in superhero terms this is “maintaining a secret identity,” but within the film it plays out like an open wound. Even though Willis is admitting to great strength, his acceptance, after long wishing it were not true, is more of a weakness. It rattles him and makes for a surprisingly emotional moment—in a movie where Samuel L. Jackson plays a comic book supervillain.
With these three hits under Shyamalan’s belt, surely, he, too, felt invincible. Newsweek magazine called him “The Next Spielberg” when he was only 31. His next picture, The Village, was promoted with a television “documentary” that suggested that Shyamalan himself may be some sort of cursed revenant with extrasensory gifts. The program was a put-on (and the scenes where he takes the crew to Jim’s Steaks in Philly are a blast), but the public was starting to get sick of this guy. The Village, ostensibly set in the 1800s, but actually not, had a zany twist that many felt went beyond believability—though I personally find it no less daffy than Willis discovering he’s akin to Superman. While far from a box office bomb, Shyamalan started to get some negative reviews.
This sent him into a bit of a tailspin. His next picture, The Lady in the Water, ostensibly a family-friendly fantasy, is one of Hollywood’s great boondoggles, and is particularly funny because it features a twerpy film critic (Bob Balaban) getting mauled by a demon as an angelic beauty (Bryce Dallas Howard) tells a misunderstood genius (Shyamalan casting himself) that he will one day write a book so brilliant it will inspire political leaders to change their ways and all of Earth’s problems will be solved. It’s the type of delusionary dream one might play out for oneself while drifting to sleep, but perhaps best not to release into movie theaters.
The Lady in the Water was destroyed by critics and audiences alike, and the sudden shift from hero to zero made Shyamalan something of a punchline to moviegoers. Don’t worry, there’s a twist to all this with his current string of films, but every good third act deserves a difficult second.
Shyamalan’s next outing, The Happening, is one that only a select few will defend—and I guess you can count me among them. Whereas Hitchcock’s The Birds details what would happen if our skyward cohabitants decided one day to kill us, The Happening shows an alliance between trees, grass, and shrubs that want to do damage to those who do damage to them. In this vaguely environmental tale, Mark Wahlberg and others find themselves running from danger before they can even identify where it is coming from.
When the wind blows, you see, anyone caught in its path freezes, then suddenly finds a way to kill themself. Easy when you are a gun-toting cop (or a construction worker atop a building), but more of a conundrum out in the sticks. This leads to the bizarre image of a man turning on an enormous lawn mower, then laying down in front of it to get all chomped up. It’s very silly to watch but … also terrifying?
Released in 2008, The Happening grappled directly with the powerlessness many felt after the 9/11 terrorism attacks and, eerily, predicted some of the first wave of COVID’s dark vibes. What I love about the movie is that the avenging plants release a toxin that, according to a scientist we see on television for 10 seconds, tamps down whatever enzyme is in our system that promotes self-preservation. The idea, I suppose, is that by removing this one simple domino, every human being defaults to an immediate and irrevocable proclivity toward suicide. Pretty dark!
No one else interprets the movie this way (most just laugh the picture off), but given Shyamalan’s love of asking big fat “why?” questions in all his work, I feel like he’d be fine with this particular take. As with Signs, though, I must reiterate that there are a lot of very funny moments in the movie, too—there’s a whole bit about hot dogs at the end of the world that’s a scream. The movie doesn’t have a twist, however, unless you consider Wahlberg and his wife (Zooey Deschanel) deciding to communicate more in their marriage a big revelation. Not everything is gold here.
After the box office failure of The Happening, Shyamalan hit a true rough patch. He did two “work for hire” gigs. The first was adapting Nickelodeon’s beloved animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender to live action, in the hopes of sparking a trilogy. The result was atrocious, but part of Shyamalan’s decision to take the gig, as he explained in a video interview with me for UGO.com that is no longer online, was that his kids loved the show, and his mother, who watched along with the family, was excited that there was a popular cartoon that had some Hindu themes. (The original series indeed features a mélange of Asian storytelling origins; alas, the Hollywood version swapped in mostly white kids for the leads.)
The dud that was The Last Airbender led to something even further removed from Shyamalan’s usual playbook: a space opera, also intended to kick-start a franchise, based on a story concept by Will Smith. The result, After Earth, which many interpreted as thinly veiled Scientology propaganda, was a disaster for Smith and Shyamalan alike.
The two big-budget assignments broke Shyamalan’s mojo not just because they lacked classic twist endings, but because they didn’t come from the man’s soul. Sincerity is what counts with Shyamalan, so in an all-or-nothing move he put his home up as collateral and self-financed his comeback—the gory, tense, and very funny suspense film The Visit. In it, a young brother and sister go to stay with their estranged grandparents on a farm and slowly realize they are serial killers. The twist at the end happened both on screen (they aren’t really the grandparents!) and off. A movie that cost $5 million made close to $100 million.
And this is the formula that’s stuck: smaller-budget projects set at one location. After The Visit came Split, in which Anya Taylor-Joy is kidnapped and held in a basement by a freaky killer (James McAvoy) with multiple personalities, then Glass, set mostly in an insane asylum, which ties Unbreakable and Split into a trilogy, and then two of the best movies of the current decade, Old and Knock at the Cabin.
Old, loosely based on a preexisting graphic novel, is absolutely idiotic. A group of tourists, including a family of four, goes to a secluded beach near an odd resort and … physically can’t leave. Some kind of force is preventing them. If that weren’t weird enough, something on the beach causes them to age rapidly. They are trapped on a beach that makes you old.
Why? Oh, please, don’t ask such questions. Ask, instead, how would people actually react. There is paranoia, disbelief, violence, anger, sadness, and finally, acceptance. There is also humor and tenderness. Little kids must soon care for their geriatric parents, and also care for children of their own (don’t ask too much about that one!). It’s a preposterous scenario, but it works because its logic, like its setting, is completely sealed. The characters are tormented in ways that make perfect sense when you realize the puppet master is a pesky philosopher who refuses to stop asking the nuns “why?” (And, in Old, Shyamalan casts himself as a sniper on the perimeter of the beach; a nice moment of self-awareness.)
Even more heart-on-its-sleeve is Knock at the Cabin, where a loving family of three is confronted by a group of kind-seeming-strangers-turned-home-invaders with horrible news. Unless someone in the family sacrifices someone else, the entire world will violently end. It’s the classic little kid question to a parent: “If someone said you had to shoot me or [insert someone else in the family’s name here], who would you choose? And no, you can’t say you’d kill yourself!” (One of the stipulations in Knock at the Cabin.)
This film is played absolutely straight-faced, and part of what makes it work is that even the zealot intruders can’t believe what they are being forced to do. Like the toxin-infected suicides of The Happening, they are driven to their task—they will convince this family and kill themselves one by one to prove it—but this time they aren’t zombies. They are terrified, but, for them, it isn’t an act of faith. They know (or so they believe) what will happen if they don’t succeed. It’s a marvelous and shocking film that goes from zero to 60 in moments and sustains itself throughout. And like Signs, it hinges on someone renouncing their atheism. In our current cinematic marketplace, anyone else making “faith-based” films is sent to a very specific marketing ghetto. Shyamalan, by adding some brutal kills and edge-of-your-seat suspense, reaches similar conclusions but maintains a wide audience. It’s a neat trick.
Shyamalan’s newest film, Trap, is somehow more playful, even though it is about a serial killer. Josh Hartnett is a goofy, dad-joke spewing father taking his teen daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to see the pop act “Lady Raven” (Saleka Shyamalan—yes, the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan). While at the arena, he notices a heavy police presence. He discovers (via ridiculous means) that the authorities know that the “Butcher,” a murderer who has terrorized the area, will attend the concert, and that no one will be allowed to leave without getting inspected. And wouldn’t you know that our polite, well-meaning pop is actually the Butcher (!!), and now he’s got to figure out a scheme to get out of there alive—all without ruining his daughter’s time at the concert.
As with, say, Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, we in the audience find ourselves transgressing every ethical instinct we have as we root for our hero to accomplish his terrible goal. (We slip out of morality so easily with well-crafted movies, we don’t even realize it sometimes.) But Trap, apart from celebrating father-daughter love both onscreen and in the casting, is imbued with a poptimist attitude. Far be it from me to spoil the specifics of a movie that’s still in theaters, but it’s the purity and adoration of teen fandom that saves the day, rescues a kidnap victim, and ends the Butcher’s rampage. The picture stands in awe of the power of sincerity.
Shyamalan still has his critics, and this newer wave of lower-budget features won’t win over those who refuse to suspend their disbelief for the sake of a good thrill. (Trap, for example, posits a current concert-going climate in which everyone has paper tickets and receipts, not mobile entry apps.) Clearly, I’m a fan of the man’s work, and not just because no one else exploits the full power of a close-up the way he does these days. Good suspense is rare (and there’s one “oh, get out of there now!” moment in Trap that has audiences screaming), but it’s Shyamalan’s willingness to stick with his initial, very basic questions about life that I continue to find surprising. Even Trap—a film mostly filled with surface pleasures in tune with its pop music setting—finds room to question the irrational nature of human cruelty. At this point in his career, for Shyamalan to produce something that’s simply mindless would be an unexpected twist.
The post M. Night Shyamalan Pulls Off the Ultimate Twist appeared first on Foreign Policy.
