Sixth Sense

In The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, in his third feature film, faces a difficult problem: how do you tell an utterly familiar, perhaps even clichéd story, about a boy who is haunted by the dead people around him? Shyamalan's answer is to give the audience what they expect, and then to turn the tables on them, using their own familiarity with the conventions of the horror genre to lead them into …

…of the relationships between the characters, as well as the relationship between the viewer and the film. It is worth experiencing once unawares to appreciate the grace with which the ending remains consistent with the rest of the film, yet uses the audience's reliance upon standard narrative and cinematic technique to maneuver us into a position where we, like Malcolm, must learn to question our own observational biases in order to arrive at the truth.