The Sixth Sense Review

The twist has swallowed the reputation, which is a shame, because the film in front of it is a restrained drama about grief and failure with almost no scares of the usual kind. Shyamalan shoots Philadelphia in winter, keeps the camera still, and rations the supernatural so carefully that the sick girl under the tent lands like an assault. Haley Joel Osment does something no eleven year old should be able to do, playing a child managing adult terror in front of people he cannot tell, and Toni Collette's scene in the stalled car is the emotional peak of the whole picture.

Bruce Willis underplays to the point of near absence, which is the correct choice and also the reason contemporary reviews split. The criticisms were fair. It is slow, the rules governing its ghosts are inconsistent, and a structure built to be rewatched exactly once has a ceiling. The imitators that followed made the machinery look cheaper than it is. What holds up is the tone, quiet and sad and unusually respectful about what fear does to a child.