The sky is blue, water is wet, andM. Night Shyamalanis going to use a plot twist to tell a story. Them’s are just the rules of the universe, folks. Although it is true that the writer/director often traffics in the thriller genre, a house practically built on plot twists, it’s inarguable that ever sinceThe Sixth Senseput Shyamalan on the map the filmmaker has used the art of the misdirect in all of his most notable tales. That’s not inherently a bad thing! Shyamalan’s twists run the complete gamut from painfully ineffective to shockingly great, with a stop for pretty much every other layer of quality in-between. WithGlass—a movie that was birthed from a plot twist itself—headed into theaters on January 18, I thought it was the perfect time to revisit Shyamalan’s resume and see just where all these twists fall.
Now, keep in mind, this is a ranking of the twists, not a ranking of the films itself; if it was, you’d all have to get mad at me for puttingSignsat number 1 because Joaquin Phoenix in a tinfoil hat brings me unmeasurable joy. Also important to note: Although we alllovediscussingAvatar: The Last AirbenderandAfter Earth,neither really has a twist worth talking about. Shyamalan wrote the twist inDevil—the old lady is Satan, a pretty gnarly twist!—but director John Erick Dowdle executed it, so that’s not included. Finally, I truly believe the only twist inLady in the Wateris the fact no one in M. Night Shyamalan’s life gently told him that scripting yourself into a movie as a universe-changing writer might be a bad idea.
With all that out of the way, here are the many plot twists of M. Night Shyamalan’s career, ranked from worst to best. This piece includesspoilersforThe Happening,The Sixth Sense,Signs,Split,Unbreakable, andThe Visit. I mean, duh.
7) ‘Signs’ - The Aliens Are Allergic to Water
I actually kind of loveSigns,Shyamalan’s genuinely spooky tale of extraterrestrials harassing an isolated Pennsylvania farmhouse before a full-scale invasion. I don’t even dislike theintentof the twist, which seesMel Gibson’s Father Graham Hess regaining his faith after a series of happenstances and memories converge randomly at the perfect moment. But lord,lord, the sloppiness of scripting one of those random circumstances to make the aliens deathly allergic to water.Water. It’s a twist that retroactively makes the threat of the film feel flimsy, these intergalactic dumb-dumbs who invented space travel but didn’t call ahead to see if it rains on Earth. Imagine if we invaded a planet that was 70% lava and were like “who could have foreseen this?” while we melted.
6) ‘The Happening’ - Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill Us
Look, I get what Shyamalan was going for withThe Happening—the filmmaker has explained it’s a big-budget B-movie several times—and a downright wonky performance fromMark Wahlbergaside, there are some genuine thrills to be had in the filmmaker’s first R-rated movie. But afterLady in the Water, Shyamalan had also completely forgotten how to let a theme justbea theme and not wallop you in the face with an explanation.The Happening’s reveal that the mass suicides taking place are not a biological attack but the result of natureliterallyfighting back against the human race’s presence on the planet is such an in-your-face message about environmentalism that every rewatch is a new nosebleed.
5) ‘The Village’ - We’ve Been In Modern Day the Whole Time
As a moody piece,The Villageholds up surprisingly well. Shyamalan—with an as-always MVP assist from cinematographerRoger Deakins—does a lot with a little in terms of tension with this film about an isolated, technology-less community in rural Pennsylvania during what appears to be the 1800s. There are monsters in them there woods, Those We Don’t Speak Of, hulking creatures in red robes with long, twiggy-y claws and…whoops, nope, the monsters aren’t real, and we aren’t in the 1800s, either. The script sends poor, blind Ivy Elizabeth Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) into the woods and out the other side to discover that the film is actually set in a modern day setting. Ivy Elizabeth’s father Edward Walker (William Hurt) founded the village in the 1970s as a social experiment in grief counseling, inventing the grammatically incorrect monsters in the woods as a barrier against the outside world.
The Village’s twist wasn’t so much bad at the time as it was painfully boring. It felt inevitable the entire film. Six years afterThe Sixth Sense,Shyamalan was at his peak as The Twist Guy, and here he crafted something that doesn’t help or hurt the story, it just…happens.Roger Ebert, the G.O.A.T.,put it betterthan I ever could: “To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.”
4) ‘Unbreakable’ - This Is Also Mr. Glass' Supervillain Origin Story
The reactions toGlassmight be all sorts of divided—if you thought I was going to say split, how dare you—butUnbreakable, the film that kicked off Shyamalan’s philosophical superhero trilogy, is still up there with his most emotionally resonant work. Which is why the film’s end reveal might be the filmmaker’s best example of a cinematic magic trick, making the audience look left while an entirely different feat is being pulled off on the right. The story of everyman David Dunn (Bruce Willis) discovering he is an invincible Superman straight out of a comic book is such an engrossing slow-build take on a classic origin story—rooted in the inherently heroic father-son relationship David shares with his son (Spencer Treat Clark)—that we don’t even notice that it doubles as a supervillain origin forSamuel L. Jackson’s brittle-boned Elijah Price, who caused the deadly train crash that revealed David’s powers.
The best part of this twist is the fact it’s one we should have noticed, if only anyone was as obsessed with comic book storytelling tropes as Price himself. “In the comics, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain is going to be?” the once-and-future Mr. Glass asks David. “He’s the exact opposite of the hero. And most times they’re friends, like you and me.”
3) ‘The Visit’ - Nana and Pop-Pop Are Actually Escaped Mental Patients
What I really enjoy about the plot twist in Shyamalan’s 2015 found-footage comebackThe Visitis that, compared to all the other shocks here, it’s not big or completely story-upending, it’s just a nasty little twist of the knife. Two Philadelphia kids, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) meet their grandparents for the first time, who promptly begin to project vomit around the house, collect dirty diapers in the garage, and generally give off a definite batshit insane vibe. Turns out, Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop-Pop (Peter McRobbie)arebatshit insane, as they are, in fact, two escaped mental patients who murdered Becca and Tyler’s actual grandparents and hid the bodies in the basement.The Visitnails the silly-scary B-movie vibe that Shyamalan whiffed so hard on withThe Happening, and this plot twist fits right into that tone, unsettling and outrageous in the same popcorn-throwing way as, say, a similar corpse hidden in the basement for Hitchcock’sPsycho.
2) ‘Split’ - A Secret ‘Unbreakable’ Spinoff
Thenerveof this twist. Two years after experiencingSplitin a packed theater and I still vividly remember the closing moments transforming me into that “I can’t believe you’ve done this” Vine in the most magical way possible. Following an entire film introducing the world toJames McAvoy’s Kevin Wendell Crumb—a DID-sufferer who shuffles through 24 distinct personalities, including the superhumanly violent Beast—Shyamalan tacks on a stinger that reveals that the movie you just watched took place in the same universe asUnbreakable, and Crumb being dubbed “The Horde” has just given Bruce Willis' David Dunn a new ripped-from-the-comics adversary.
More so than any of Shyamalan’s other twists, this one was practically begging to be rejected. What ifSplitwas…bad? Or, possibly even more likely, what if sixteen years and numerous flops after Unbreakable, moviegoers simply didn’t care? ButSplit, a tense, tight, entertaining two hours, turned out to be Shyamalan’s definitive return-to-form, and the hype for a Dunn v. Crumb showdown was palpable.
This almost feels like a cop-out, but what would you have me do? On the Mount Rushmore of plot twists that, for better or worse, completely changed the game—next to “A boy’s best friend is his mother”, “I am your father”, and “You met me at a very strange time in my life”—The Sixth Sense’s reveal that Bruce Willis' Dr. Malcolm Crowe has been dead from the film’s first scene hangs quiet and heavy. It’s Shyamalan’s personal best twist because it also demonstrates all his best traits as a filmmaker. Over the years he’s growntremendouslyun-subtle, but watchThe Sixth Senseover and over and you’ll notice the eventual twist reveals itself with a shockingly gentle touch. It’s all hushed-voice hints and averted glances. The scene where Crowe meets his wife Anna (Olivia Williams) at a restaurant is a masterclass in eyeline and dialoguenotspoken. And that’s the thing; it could have been so obvious, but Shyamalan walks this story on such a razor-sharp, emotional line that we accept the aching pain of a crumbling marriage over the plot twist that’s being spelled out for us in whispers. A good twist retroactively makes a movie better; this one madeThe Sixth Sensea classic.
For more Shyamalan, check out the links below:
