M. Night Shyamalan, ranked (Part 1)

No currently working auteurs have had quite the career trajectory of M. Night Shyamalan, simultaneously one of my favorite filmmakers currently working and someone I frequently cannot stand. The stratospheric success of The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002) made him seem like the next Spielberg.

And then the bottom fell out. Shyamalan's love of twists became the primary way the American viewing public understood him, and all of his movies started being unfairly consumed via that lens. Signs, for instance, doesn't really have a twist so much as a bunch of seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces snapping into place, but it was treated as though its third act featured twist after twist, where any other filmmaker might have gotten less scrutiny for that. It also didn't help that The Village (2004) featured a doozy of a twist that makes less and less literal sense the more you think about it.

After that, he descended into ignominy, culminating in his lifeless The Last Airbender (2010), which felt like work-for-hire slop, even though he genuinely wanted to bring Avatar: The Last Airbender to the big screen; and After Earth (2013), which really was a work-for-hire gig.

But rather than returning every few years with a new indifferently made blockbuster, Shyamalan instead went off the grid. He went indie, using his own money to make the low-budget 2015 horror film The Visit, and the success of that movie allowed him to get more lower-budget films made, until his budgets were slowly but surely creeping back up again. He's still very much an acquired taste, and he'll make an incredibly embarrassing film now and then, but the scale of his ambitions and his sheer technical skill as a filmmaker match up more often than not. He's less the next Spielberg than he is an Alfred Hitchcock who perhaps would rather be making Jason Katims shows. He seems like a chill dad who likes making movies with people he trusts (including his kids). And I can respect that!

That in mind, let's rank the M. Night Shyamalan films in two parts. The first half you're reading right now, and the second half posts Friday for paid subscribers! (Yes, I'm that shameless, why do you ask?) While I have you here...

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Extra credit: Shyamalan's TV work

Properly speaking, I cannot rank Shyamalan's work directing the pilot of Fox's Wayward Pines and five episodes of AppleTV+'s Servant against his films, but Servant, especially, is quite fun and worth watching. And Wayward Pines, which debuted in summer 2015, marked step one in Shyamalan's comeback, with The Visit following later that year. It being a hit did a lot to boost his reputation. Are either of these shows essential? Nah. But Servant goes to some places you might enjoy if you're a horror fan – and especially if you want to see a truly bold performance from Nell Tiger Free of The First Omen fame. (Also, if you love a good reveal, the pilot has a doozy.)

Not seen: Praying with Anger (1992) and Wide Awake (1998)

Shut up. You haven't seen these either!

14) The Last Airbender (2010)

As I have previously established at this very newsletter, this movie is pretty rotten. You can see why Shyamalan was drawn to the Nickelodeon show. For one thing, it's pretty great. For another, it surely appealed to his deep love of worlds that have tons of lore baked into them. But as this film attempts to adapt the entire 20-episode first season of the show into a two-hour film, it ends up feeling at once breathless and inert, running so fast to get through every plot point that it ends up feeling like it's standing still. One of the most enervating movies I've ever seen.

13) After Earth (2013)

Arriving just after Will Smith's imperial phase had wrapped up – but when Hollywood still believed in him enough to just center major blockbusters on his kids – After Earth is the most anonymously directed film in Shyamalan's entire filmography. Its core conceit of a kid having to make his way across an Earth where the animals we know have evolved into vicious beasts is pretty solid (and reminded me of the excellent Dougal Dixon book After Man), and the movie has some fairly enjoyable set pieces. Yet its core conceit – it's important to understand danger but not feel fear – sucks almost all of the tension out of the movie, and that's before you get to the fact that all of this has led many critics to accuse the film of being Scientology propaganda. (Shyamalan, who was raised Hindu but attended Catholic school, would never, which is how you know this was work for hire.)

12/12) (tie) Split (2016)/Glass (2019)

Few moments in recent popcorn movies have had quite the pop of that final moment in Split when you realize that shit, this is happening in the Unbreakable universe. James McAvoy's performance in both of these films is wildly overcommitted (in a fun way), and Shyamalan is perhaps the only person to ever utilize Anya Taylor-Joy as simply "the final girl" and get away with it. (I guess she's also a final girl in The Witch, but that feels like stretching the definition of the trope to its breaking point.) It's also great to see Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson again in the sequel, and both are reasonably dialed in. It's really nice to have this last Willis movie star performance before his decline in health.

But I just... don't like these movies. I want to! So many of the elements should work, but I cannot get past the way they deal with mental health and dissociative identity disorder. I'm sure there's a bit of hypocrisy here, since I deeply enjoy The Visit, which is a nasty movie about how as people get older, they become psychopaths, but I can just never get past the fact that McAvoy is playing essentially a movie monster layered on top of a real psychological condition.

Horror, as a genre, deals with our anxieties around lots of frailties in our bodies and minds, so I do try to cut it some slack in how it deals with, say, the idea that everybody with some sort of mental illness might just turn into slasher, but I can't quite get past it here. That's a me thing, though! If you love these movies, I get it! Shyamalan in true sicko mode throughout!

10) The Happening (2008)

Now we're cooking with gas! (The gas is released by plants to make us take our own lives.) (Thanks, plants!)

The Happening has gained a reputation as a terrific "so bad it's good" watch, which is not unfair. There is some truly ridiculous stuff in this film, especially if you like watching people run from a gentle breeze. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel strike me as pretty miscast here, though I don't know that any actor other than Wahlberg could have turned talking to a plastic tree into such a comedic tour de force.

Yet much of what makes people love The Happening lies in the sense – which has overhung Shyamalan's career – that he doesn't know he's making something silly. Yet his work post-The Visit and especially in the 2020s has underlined that he really does have a sense of humor about what he's doing, and in the parts of The Happening where people just abruptly start unaliving themselves, the sickness of the horror is punctuated by the darkness of the humor.

Does that sound like I love The Happening? It kind of does, doesn't it? I've definitely warmed to the film since I first saw it back in theaters, and I like the way that it plays as an early example of climate anxiety horror (a subgenre that Shyamalan has returned to). Ultimately, I just can't get past the movie's casting issues or the way that it kind of dissolves into nothing once it becomes about, like, the failure of this one specific marriage in the face of the end of the world. But it's way more fun and thoughtful than I gave it credit for in 2008.

9) The Visit (2015)

By my count, this is the last traditional "twist" Shyamalan has featured in one of his films. All of his subsequent films have third acts that seem like they contain twists but ultimately do exactly what they say on the tin. (I guess Old seems to violate that idea, but we'll deal with that when we come to it.) And the twist in The Visit is so deliberately calibrated that you will absolutely guess it before it arrives – and yet that's part of the fun. I don't know that The Visit wants you to be ahead of it, but it still works really well if you are.

This is, yes, a movie about how old people are coming to kill you and especially your grandparents are coming to kill you (and/or old people are coming to kill your grandparents). It is not especially subtle about this point – or particularly sensitive about it, for that matter. And yet there's something universal in it all the same. We are all aging, and with every new day we live past, say, 35, we might notice some new way we can't quite match up to our old selves. The Visit turns the elderly into its villains, but with some degree of understanding that we're all headed in that direction anyway. (Ti West's recent X makes this point slightly more skillfully.)

Also, this movie really underscores how good Shyamalan is at casting. Olivia DeJonge has had enough of a career in other things – notably, she was Priscilla in Elvis – that it's easy to forget Shyamalan more or less made her the lead of this film when she was 17. And he was way ahead of the Kathryn Hahnissance. And he cast Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie in roles that let them have a ton of fun as the aforementioned evil old people. The Visit gains so much from perfect casting.

That said, points off for Shyamalan's constant fascination with, like, people you wouldn't expect to rap going on to rap.

8) Lady in the Water (2006)

I am not yet fully Lady in the Water-pilled, not like some folks I know. For one thing, I have never revisited it since seeing it in theaters, and the odds that I would watch it again and find it absolutely execrable are... high, since I have largely wiped my memory of the things I hated about it. Yet that in and of itself is notable: Unlike many other films I so strongly disliked on an initial viewing, I seem to have only retained the elements of this that I liked in my memory over the years – its gentle, elegaic tone; its love of the world of characters within its boundaries; its appreciation for class dynamics. I love modern fairy tales, and this is definitely – and sometimes defiantly – a modern fairy tale. Also, the film's dislike of critics strikes me less and less as a fatal flaw over the years, simply because I do think Shyamalan's big-hearted empathy also encompasses said critic, in its way.

That said, this is still the movie where M. Night Shyamalan plays a guy who writes a book that will save the world, and I just can't entirely countenance that.

That said, this movie also features a creature called the "scrunt," and I can countenance that!

What do I think of The Sixth Sense? Unbreakable, TRAP!!!???? To find out, you'll have to come back on Friday (and click the below button to make sure you can read it). See you then!

This week's reading music: "Those We Don't Speak Of," James Newton Howard

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published most Wednesdays, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).