The Sixth Sense

A film set in Philadelphia. Malcolm is a child psychologist. One night a former patient breaks into his house, blames him, shoots him and kills himself. The following autumn Malcolm is working with a new child. Cole is nine, excluded at school, hides in a church, and tells his mother nothing. Cole finally says it. He sees dead people, and they do not know they are dead. From there the film proceeds like a treatment story without giving up its horror. A kitchen, a tent, a hospital corridor and a detention room. What the narrative is interested in is not ghosts but not being heard: almost everyone in the film fails to hear what someone is saying; the mother does not hear the child, the wife does not hear the doctor, and the dead cannot reach anyone. The conversation between Cole and his mother in the car is the best scene in the film and contains no horror at all. The colour red is used as a system throughout; the director said he used it only at the moments where the real world is punctured. The information at the end changes the structure of the narrative, and on a second viewing it becomes a different film. Bruce Willis was coming off a run of failures at the time, and taking this part turned his career around. Haley Joel Osment was nominated for an Academy Award at eleven, and Toni Collette was nominated as well. The film had six nominations. M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes horror built out of quiet rather than noise. Who it is not for: anyone who already knows the ending; half the narrative rests on it.