There’s so much more to M. Night Shyamalan than a collection of twist endings
With the writer-director's Old now in theaters, we look back on the ups and downs of a divisive career
Film Features M. Night Shyamalan
M. Night Shyamalan is one of the few Hollywood directors working today who qualifies as a household name. But what reputation does that name now carry?Since bursting into the public eye with his third feature, the Oscar-nominated box-office phenomenon The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan has experienced ups and downs, disappointments and comebacks. Today, he’s sometimes treated like an industry punchline and punching bag, even as his movies continue to do good business and satisfy a faithful critical fanbase. On this week’s episode of Film Club, A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss the career of this divisive blockbuster auteur, whose latest thriller, Old, is now playing in theaters.
Here’s what Dowd had to say in his written review of Old:
In the two decades since The Sixth Sense made him a household name, Shyamalan hasn’t much improved at writing dialogue. His characters still speak a stilted language of blunt emotional declaration and corny one-liners, periodically sounding like aliens approximating human interaction. But in Old, the anti-naturalistic clang of the exchanges eventually starts to contribute to the general nightmare vibe of Shyamalan’s scenario. At the manager’s suggestion, the family ends up decamping for a private swim on the other end of the island, joining a small group of fellow guests that includes a racist surgeon (Rufus Sewell), his bombshell wife (Abbey Lee), their grade-school-aged daughter (Kylie Begley), a SoundCloud rapper (Aaron Pierre), and a few others. “Something is going on with time on this beach,” one of them dimly, belatedly deduces, long after the adults start collecting wrinkles and their children start racing towards puberty at world-record speed.
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29 Comments
The Alamo Drafthouse near me, next week, is showing M. Night Shyamalan Presents: JAWS and I’m still trying to figure out what it is.Do we find out at the end that Roy Scheider was actually a shark the whole time?
You did the thing!
To be fair, some of his movies are just awesome and enjoyable to watch. That’s always been true in his entire career thus far.The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, first two-third of The Village, The Visit, Split.I have yet to watch The Devil and give Old a try, though.
For what it’s worth from a rando on the Internet, I thought Devil was pretty damn good, and in being directed by someone else it avoided M. Night’s worst habits and kept it tight. 80 minutes, in and out, told the story, done.
We are all randos here. We are all extras, bots. That is the twist!
I tend to think he’s a better director than a writer.
Yeah, absolutely.
I would cosign this. Although I have not seen The Visit yet.The thing about The Village, is that it wasted so many great things with the confounding ending. It’s hard to feel more than disappointment for how amazing it could have been if you didn’t feel so silly afterwards.
As I butt in and say every time the movie is mentioned, totally agree, but goddamn, the original trailer for The Village is one of the best of all time. I challenge anyone to watch that trailer and not say “holy crap do I have to see this movie.”
Absolutely
Sort of agree here about The Village. I did kind of get why the weird ending had to happen, but I do admit that there are likely better ways to end the story and tie up all of these loose threads. Kind of wasted these amazingly magical-realism supernatural aspects with that ending, though.
It’s an interesting thought exercise for sure. Would it have been more satisfying if the conclusion were the same, but with less detail explaining the “how” of it all? Then the audience could attempt to fill in the gaps later. Maybe if Bryce Dallas Howard’s character had stumbled onto a modern piece of technology within, or just outside the town. That would signal to us that there was something anachronistic going on, but wouldn’t hit us over the head with it.
A point that my friend brings out about The Village is that it begins with a straight up lie. They have a tombstone with a date in the 1820’s, I believe. This is there only to deceive the audience as it makes no difference if it said the true date of the 2000’s to the characters within the film. Their village and its history is a construct. There’s no way that the kids will discern the lie if they know that they’re really living in the 21st century because they have no information of the outside world at all or its history. At least with the Sixth Sense, you can go back and watch it to see the clues for the twist ending.
I suppose that’s true. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that they chose a year that suited the aesthetic and lifestyle they were trying to recreate and just committed to it in that way. It saves them from having to rewrite the timeline of history within their own minds. And might keep them from slipping up when they explain historical based things to the children. It does seem like a pretty deceptive detail though, sure.
It saves them from having to rewrite the timeline of history within their own minds.I suppose, but all of the stuff that adds up to the twist is like that. I seem to remember they have some sort of line that airplanes can’t fly overhead because of (something-something). But why? Who gives a shit if the kids can see airplanes? Since it’s all lies they have no basis of comparison, just call airplanes “the great and shiny condors that never land” or some shit. Make them part of the mythology. “Oh, our blah-blah religious thing keeps them at bay” or something.
But since the whole movie is working so damn hard to trick the audience, they have to do a bunch of shit that wouldn’t be needed otherwise.
I liked The Happening and I am not going to to regret saying so. I am down for an absurdist movie.Hated Split though. And Avatar is watchable if you remove the sound.
At least we could agree that Glass is a major disappointment?And I’ll never watch botched live-action Avatar film when there’s already great animated series that tells the same story better.
Glass is a dissapointment because it is so boring. Why is it boring? Whyyy?
Because the movie wasted 2/3rd of its runtime trying to convince us that their superhero and villains are anything but when we already knew the whole time that they are, given their developments in the previous two films.I mean, I get the theme they’re trying to go for given what was revealed at the end, but they should have done a better job going through the similar motion. We were expecting great tensions between the three main characters and we never gotten that.So yeah Glass is a disappointment.
I saw Glass with a group of friends. My expectations were low, and I enjoyed it a lot. Jackson’s having a good time, I was surprised by the twist…it was a pleasant evening at the movies. What more can you want?
Every other person I saw it with (and have interacted with on the internet) hated it, so I’ve come to accept I’m in the minority here. I do think with time it’ll be appreciated as a very different take on superheroes amidst the six studio paint-by-numbers films that come out every year, and that process will be helped by the fact that (as you point out) some of the knowledge of the previous films isn’t assumed going into this one.
The first five minutes of The Happening was pretty great. The rest…..
Full disclosure: I’m an M. Night Shyamalan apologist.When it comes to The Village, I love the movie but I agree the ending could’ve been done better. I remember thinking if this was anyone other than Shyamalan or if this was his first movie (basically, not expecting the twist), it wouldn’t be as much of a detriment. I put The Village and Sunshine in the same category as a personal favorite that is about 90% perfect.
The Visit is ridiculously stupid and I refute it’s idea that old people are inherently scary.
This is the internet, so we don’t have to be fair. I enjoyed The Sixth Sense. But I could never get over the gaping logical flaw in Signs (why are aliens invading a planet where the thing that kills them covers 70% of the surface and FALLS FROM THE SKY (and I could discuss humidity at length which is really just water suspended in the air all around us all the time)). The twist in The Village was obvious a few minutes in. The one with the apartment with the pool was just garbage. I stopped watching anything with his name anywhere near it because it became a colossal waste of time. He became a punch line for a reason.
FWIW, I’ve always appreciated his movies for being specifically local to Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Not because I have any special connection to those places, but it’s refreshing in stories where the location is not a version of New York, LA, etc., or so numbingly generic that the background details never seem to mater because, who cares, it’s not part of the story anyways. Locations that would otherwise be generic like a school, or a stadium, or whatever, never have to be framed in such a way to avoid the intrusion of secondary and tertiary buildings which might snap you out of suspended disbelief. The world of the stories and characters has space to breath without needing to be explained. It’s fine. We don’t have to talk about this like it’s Mare of Easton, or something set in Derry, Maine. Just be confident in the place your filming and let the audience take from it what they will.
His trajectory was memorably graphed over time here:https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/07/what-happened-to-m-night-shyamalan.html
That was just as he bottomed out.Old was better than Glass (which kerning is right about), but not as good as Split.
The sixth sense was good, after that it was between Meh-Crap. But like Tyler Perry, everyone has their fans. And just like people that watch Real House Wives or men that get paid to be kicked in the balls… i just don’t get it.
I can’t find a link to the transcript of the podcast.
M. Night is as up-and-down as has been said, yes.But let me say that Split is a massive, genuinely transgressive, weird, propulsive pop movie. If it came out under any other name, it would be in the same category as Predestination or The Little Hours for me: a real pop gem that actually does its own thing. In an era when friends were telling me that Guardians or Dr Strange were “different” or “special” somehow, I was so, so happy to watch Split. (p.s. I like marvel just fine. just saying.)