What Makes "The Sixth Sense" Great.

It really is a shame that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has never really recaptured the spark he achieved in 1999 with The Sixth Sense. All of his films afterward have been a mix of to put it nicely( with the exception of his 2000 follow up, "Unbreakable"). While he has been a bit more consisted recently, it seems that he will never make it back to the level he was at when he made this masterpiece.

If you go into The Sixth Sense expecting a typical jump scare horror movie with ghosts, you will either be disappointed or pleasantly surprised. The film is at its core a drama with a strong emotional drive. The relationship between Malcolm (Bruce Willis) and Cole (Haley Joel Osment) is one of the best adult-child relationships ever put to film. While Cole may be the one who is supposed to be the one getting the help with his dead people problem, it is both characters who ultimately learn something valuable. Malcolm is currently going through a troubled relationship with his wife (Anna Crowe) after a near-fatal shooting of Malcolm at the hands of one of his former patients now a grown tortured man. He begins to see Cole as a way of redemption over not being able to help that patient when he was a child. Cole is also going through family troubles with his parents having recently gone through a divorce leaving him in custody of his loving but stressed mother (Toni Collette). Shyamalan makes the relationship with Malcolm and Cole feel real, it really feels like a psychiatrist and troubled child relationship with Malcolm playing games and telling jokes as a way of trying to get Cole to open himself up. Cole also while still troubled still acts like a kid with him showing off his toy soldiers collection to Malcolm and describing their roles within his toy army and describing his emotionally troubling writing as "upset words". The relationship between Cole and his mother is also very strong as well as heartbreaking with Cole's mother feeling helpless at not being able to understand her son's problems and how to help him. It's this emotional heart that makes it feel like those classic Spielberg films like "ET" or "Close Encounters" with its plot centering around a subject that in terms of realism is out there, but also has a strong emphasis on heart, broken families, and paternal relationships.

Willis gives a very subtle and real performance with his quiet and calm demeanor and delivery, hiding a man that has a good amount of regret and guilt. Osment's performance is one of the best ever from child actors. He is the heart of the movie and is arguably the best thing about the movie. Like Willis, its a mostly subtle performance that perfectly captures a troubled boy that fears for his safety every day and hides that fear by trying to appear meek and unassuming. Toni Collette also gives a strong performance as Cole's mother. She perfectly captures the stress of being a single mother of a child with problems that she doesn't know how to communicate with her son about.

When it comes to the more scary aspects of the film, however, it is important to note that The Sixth Sense is a supernatural film, more so than a horror or thriller film. Shyamalan goes for disturbing the audience rather than actually scaring them. We see this style throughout the film, such as at the beginning with Malcolm confronting his shooter who is almost naked showing his self-harm scars and visibly shaking in fear. He also does this when dealing with ghosts such as when Cole sees a dead boy offering to show off his dad's gun and turning around with the back of his head appears to have been shot. This is also helped by James Newton Howard's haunting score capturing the tense and chilling atmosphere that Shyamalan and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto brings to the city of Philadelphia.

The Sixth Sense perfectly merges chills with heart, and still stands as a staple of the twists and turns reputation of Shyamalan, and a reminder of how good he can really be.