Get your own Free Home Page
In The Sixth Sense, his latest too-infrequent departure from the big-bang action formula, Bruce Willis helps further establish the summer of 1999 as one the best seasons for quality suspense and horror movies in a generation. He plays Dr. Malcolm Crowe, noted Philadelphia child psychiatrist, who one evening is enjoying a playfully romantic interlude with his wife when a former patient breaks in, babbling frantically and assaulting him before committing suicide. A few months later, suffering guilt at twice having failed to help that poor soul, the doctor encounters a disturbingly similar case in young Cole (Haley Joel Osment, who played Forrest Gump’s unlikely love child, and also TV son to “Jeff Foxworthy” and “Murphy Brown”). The child’s sociopathy initially strikes him as stemming from physical and emotional abuse, but there are other forces at work that are more difficult to identify. As his interest in the case turns to obsession, not only for the boy’s sake but to find redemption for his earlier oversight, he increasingly neglects his wife (Rushmore’s Olivia Williams). What he eventually realizes is that Cole, as was his own assailant, is sensitive to those spirits of the dead, recent and otherwise, whose departures were particularly tragic. They hounded the previous patient to death, and are now pursuing Cole.
I can’t say any more about how things turn out, because The Sixth Sense has a gently mind-blowing finale that had the audience, me included, shaking its collective head with wonder: “But...but...hey, now, wait a minute -- well, yeah, I guess so...” By employing such understated style, 29-year-old writer/director M. Night Shamalan (Wide Awake) ably makes the simplest things almost insufferably eerie, as in a scene in where the mere sight of a figure walking across the room has everybody shrieking in his/her seat. While Shamalan’s script isn’t quite as polished as his direction (there’s one particularly good shot, of Joel reaching for a doorknob, that looks a lot like an Escher painting), it still gives Willis an opportunity to stretch dramatically, something he hasn’t done much since being the most compelling player in Pulp Fiction. Yet as good as he is, he’s thoroughly upstaged by Haley Joel Osment, who was born right around the time Laurence Olivier died, so maybe there’s something to reincarnation after all. My chief complaint is, the trailers for T6thS were misleading to the point that I kept expecting a turn that never even came close to happening. Fortunately, the twist that did materialize made up for it. B
Get your own Free Home Page