We recommend Shyamalan’s patient ghost story for Willis and Osment, whose conversations are its most affecting scenes. The music sometimes insists on feelings the actors have already made clear.
We recommend The Sixth Sense for the care it takes with its frightened people, with a caveat about the music’s determination to make us feel for them. M. Night Shyamalan builds his ghost story around the relationship between Malcolm Crowe and Cole Sear. The deliberate pace will test anyone waiting for a regular supply of shocks. Those prepared to settle into the conversations get a film that takes the business of listening unusually seriously.
Bruce Willis makes Malcolm’s attentiveness interesting, which is a harder task than simply making him sympathetic. His restraint gives Haley Joel Osment room to play Cole without turning every exchange into a demonstration of adult wisdom. Osment carries much of the fear, and the performance remains persuasive when the film asks for open emotion. We were moved by their conversations because Willis gives the boy’s distress time and attention, allowing us to hear it without immediately being told how to feel.
Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography keeps the actors central to the unease; the photography does not need to announce that something dreadful might happen. In the dialogue scenes, simply looking at these two people is absorbing enough. Larry Fulton’s production design helps the drama feel lived in, giving the supernatural material surroundings we can accept without stopping to admire them. That is valuable work in a film where too much visual fuss would make the distress harder to believe.
Editor Andrew Mondshein allows those conversations to settle, and the deliberate pace is mostly justified by the performances. We have time to consider a response instead of being hurried towards the next piece of information. James Newton Howard’s score is less patient with us, occasionally making the emotional instruction too clear. The music is the chief reservation: when it pushes for tenderness, it makes a carefully acted scene feel more managed than it needs to.
Shyamalan is not entirely free of more ordinary horror habits, either. A few scares feel second-hand, and they are the moments when the film briefly loses the confidence that makes its quieter stretches so effective. The writing can also make Malcolm’s sympathy seem a little too convenient, as though a useful listener needs no rough edges. None of this ruins the scenes between the two leads, but there are passages where the script’s kindness seems too carefully arranged.
Within a supernatural thriller, Shyamalan’s willingness to let a conversation carry so much of the film is welcome. Its solemnity occasionally becomes tiring, though taking the characters seriously is what allows the quieter scenes to hold our attention. The 107-minute running time leaves room for those exchanges, and the film needs an evening when an unhurried conversation sounds like a pleasure. Choose it when the house is quiet and nobody is expecting the ghosts to do all the work.
