Genre: Drama | Thriller
(2 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)
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Release: 6 August 1999
The Sixth Sense is a horror/thrill with a difference. It is not like your every day horror films like Living Dead or Blair Witch Project. Rather, it is psychological thriller that stuns you with shock and surprise, multiple times.
Bruce Willis plays Malcolm Crowe who is a child psychologist returning home along with his wife (played Olivia Williams) after winning an award. But their celebration doesn’t last long as they find Vincent Gray (played by Donnie Wahlberg), Malcolm’s ex patient hiding in their home. He shoots Malcolm in the stomach and then kills himself.
A year after the incident, Malcolm meets another boy named Cole Sear (played by Haley Joel Osment) whose case is very similar to his attacker Vincent Gray’s. But after the incident, Malcolm has lost all confidence in himself and by helping this boy, he wants to assuage the guilt he experiences for Vincent. His marriage is also in trouble and his wife has stopped listening to him. She watches their wedding video and crying every night.
As his wife is ignoring him, Malcolm puts all of his attention towards Cole. Despite a doting mother (played by Toni Collette), Cole is a complete outcast at school. One day, Cole confesses that he “sees dead people.” He can see ghosts of people who don’t know they are dead and are usually confused. Malcolm’s diagnosis says that Cole is delusional, but evidences tell a completely different story and boy keeps getting more and frightened everyday.
The Sixth Sense has a slight resemblance to Mercury Rising that also starred Bruce Willis. In that movie, Willis rescued an autistic boy from a conspiracy. But that movie didn’t work as its plot was not compelling. But with The Sixth Sense, the filmmakers, producers and actors have a winner in their hand.
Written and directed M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense is an intriguing movie that holds your attention from the first to the last scene. His last movie was Wide Awake which had a boy coping with his grandfather’s death. In this movie also, Shyamalan works on the similar spiritual subject about the afterlife, but the atmosphere in this one is much spookier.
Osment has already proved his talent in the movie Forrest Gump in which he played the role of Forrest Gump’s son. The boy is the best choice to play the role of haunted boy. His eyes are somber and look like they know something we don’t. The boy has our sympathy the moment we look at him.
By now, Bruce Willis has specialized in the role of a nice guy looking for redemption. You may fault him for not playing variety of characters, but nobody can discount the skills he brings to his role in the movie.
Shyamalan has written an emotional, yet strongly constructed supernatural script. The movie does have one or two scares which make you jump in your seat, but he mostly relies on gradually charging the film’s atmosphere until it reaches an electrifying ending. Don’t miss the climax!
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