Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Bruce Willis, Toni Collette, Olivia Williams, Haley Joel Osment
Have I Seen It Before: I have a distinct feeling this is going to make up the majority of the review*. The film works—as so many of Shyamalan’s do—as a magic trick. The first time I saw the film, I could swear—and I mean swear, just as much as I swore that Beyond the Cabin in the Woods did an episode of Maximum Overdrive (1986) five years before we actually did one—there was a scene where Lynn (Collette) and and Crowe (Willis) have a conversation about Cole (Osment).
Has that scene—which would fundamentally undercut everything about the film that made it special—ever been in the film at any other point I’ve seen it? No. It was never there.
But as I watched the film the first time, my brain filled in the missing parts of the story. As such, the narrative sleight-of-hand that both branding and possibly compulsion have demanded from Shyamalan ever since worked like a charm here. I was looking exactly where the film wanted me to look at every single moment, so that when the boom is finally lowered, I was thoroughly fooled.
And so were you. Admit it.
Did I Like It: Judging a Shyamalan film but the success of its final reveal feels a bit reductive, if unavoidable. Unbreakable (2000) lives rent-free in my head because the magic still works, but I dismissed the entirety of The Village (2004) the moment I figured out the ending** and dismissed it as a kind of dumb. Here, the ending that we’re all dancing around is kind of beside the point. The reason this film made Shyamalan a household name is because the film that precedes it is filled with performers engaged with well-realized material, and bringing everything they can to characters we care about.
Maybe the ending of Shyamalan film never mattered, after all?
*Look at that. I was right.
**Which was about twenty minutes into the film, incidentally.