DISCOURSE MOVIE REVIEW: The Sixth Sense

A psychological thriller about a scared little boy, his doctor, and the most haunted city in America.

Getty Images

Philadelphia is overrun with ghosts. The city was established in 1682, nearly 350 years ago, but Dutch colonists arrived in the Delaware Valley in the early 17th century, and, naturally, the Lenape people had been living there for much longer. That’s a lot of bloody history, a lot of death and suffering, so it feels only natural that, if you’re inclined to believe in them, the City of Brotherly Love is probably haunted as hell.

Or at least that’s how it appears to Cole Sear (played by a fantastic Haley Joel Osment with a name that somewhat obviously evokes seer in the supernatural sense), a nine-year-old boy tormented by his ability to see ghosts moving through the world like you or I, unaware that they are dead.

You’re going to want to put a pin in that one for later.

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense opens with renowned child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), at home and blitzed on expensive wine with wife Anna (Olivia Williams). They’re celebrating the City of Philadelphia giving the good doctor a commendation for his work helping children in the community. But not so fast—looks like there’s at least one former kid Malcolm failed to save. He’s Vincent Grey (played by a convincingly traumatized Donnie Wahlberg), who’s broken into the Crowe’s historic home in his dirty skivvies to confront Malcolm. He doesn’t say much about how specifically the doc failed him, so we’re left thinking Malcolm must be one of those mental health professionals who doesn’t take ANY insurance. Vincent produces a gun and shoots Malcolm in the belly before killing himself.

Time passes, and we come upon Malcolm waiting to stalk Cole on his way to school. Stranger danger!! At this point, no one seems to have hired him as Cole’s doctor. Malcolm basically just keeps showing up in Cole’s life, including his home, where he lives with his mother, played by an ascendent Toni Collette. He and Cole play ice-breaker games until Cole agrees to work with him. Cole is still convinced the doctor can’t help him, but eventually the child admits his horrifying secret: “I see dead people.” What a line, and Osment delivers it with the dogged terror of an actor far beyond his years. He also says the dead “want me to do things for them,” but unwinding what they want in particular is something Cole and Dr. Crowe will have to figure out.

Throughout the movie, we see Malcolm coming home from work and being completely snubbed by his wife, Anna. Sure, he misses their anniversary dinner, but she’s so mad she won’t even look at or acknowledge him!! She also seems pretty depressed about something and Malcolm can’t seem to get the door to the wine cellar in their house open. No matter, at least Malcolm has his work with a spooky child to focus on.

There are eerie similarities between Cole and Vincent Grey’s afflictions, which prompt Malcom to pull out the old files. While listening to a tape of one of their sessions, Crowe hears a voice pleading for its life in Spanish when Vincent was supposedly alone in the room, leading him to finally believe that Cole’s telling the truth about the whole “seeing ghosts” thing and not just schizophrenic—and that Vincent had the same ability and/or curse. No one ever believes the kid in horror movies, to their peril!

We’ve already seen some of the apparitions Cole sees—like three hanged bodies at his school, which we are shown after his teacher contradicts his assertion that they used to hang people in the building—but a vision of a young girl (Mischa Barton, one to watch), who seems to be choking up viscous goo, turns up the movie’s urgency.

They go to the girl’s home for the wake, where she gives them a videotape hidden away in her bedroom. Cole gives it to her grieving father, who pops the tape in right in the middle of the wake, to see it holds video evidence that her mother was poisoning her. He confronts her in the middle of all those people—this is why you ALWAYS go to the wake! FOMO on something insanely dramatic and personal happening!—with the implication being that the revelation has saved the girl’s younger sister from the same fate. We don’t really see him help other ghosts “find peace,” that classic horror movie trope, but I appreciate Shyamalan for subverting it: At least in the one case the movie gives us to consider, the ghosts are only appearing because they have practical, right-now tasks Cole can still do to help them save their souls, if not their bodies.

Therapy basically works; it’s confession for an increasingly areligious but spiritually destitute country, and Cole is doing much better now. He’s definitely still seeing those pesky ghosts—he’s talking to a matronly specter as she applies his makeup backstage—but he’s cast in the school play, which Malcolm watches, beaming with pride, from the back of the theater. Maybe all the kid needed was a father figure after all!

On the car ride home, stuck in traffic behind an accident, Cole at last reveals his secret to his mother by detailing things his late grandmother has told him that only she and his mother would know. She’s emotionally overwhelmed but is convinced he has the ability he claims. I love that this scene depicts an important feature of my own childhood, where it was easiest to have serious conversations with my Mother in the car. These were often long, uninterrupted stretches of unstructured time just the two of us, where we were already inclined to mull things over. My mind was free to wander, I could start nibbling around the edges of whatever I was thinking about, and most importantly, I didn’t have to look her straight in the eye (we’re Midwestern).

I digress!! But let that digression serve as a VISUAL LINE OF DEMARCATION that this movie has a MAJOR SPOILER that I’ll be discussing below. I’ve never seen a SPOILER this consequential before, and it will ruin the movie for you if you know it going in.

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING — I’M SO SERIOUS

⚠️ ⚠️ MAJOR THE SIXTH SENSE PLOT SPOILER BELOW ⚠️ ⚠️

DO NOT READ ON IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE SIXTH SENSE AND THEREFORE DO NOT KNOW THE SPOILER

I was expecting the movie to end pretty nicely with Cole and his mother both knowing he sees the dead and being cool with it. Maybe he’s got a career path early! But how do we tie things up with Malcolm and his distant, deeply sad wife? Before the doc leaves Cole’s play, Cole suggests Malcolm try speaking with her while she’s sleeping in hopes that she’ll reply without her superego getting in the way.

Malcolm comes home to his wife asleep on the couch, their wedding tape playing. As they speak, Anna asks him, “Why did you leave me?” He replies he didn’t, but is rebutted with the sound of gold hitting historic hardwood: She drops a wedding band from her hand, which roles across the floor. It looks a lot like his own wedding band, which in fact it is. What does it mean??? The movie flashes back to Cole explaining that he sees dead people who don’t know they’re dead and “only see what they want to see,” along with a series of scene flashbacks that we’re now viewing in a totally different light, like why we never see other people interact with Malcolm or how his wife snubbed him at the anniversary dinner at a table set for only one. The cellar door he can’t open?? Anna moved a heavy table in front of it!! As she shudders from the cold—the universal sign for ghost—it dawns on Malcolm and us: HE’S BEEN A GHOST HIMSELF THIS WHOLE TIME!!!

Now, the filmmaker lets us see what we didn’t in the movie’s opening scene: When Vincent shoots Malcolm, he staggers back onto the bed and quickly dies. Really bad luck, he must’ve hit an artery or something! Malcolm the Ghost now reaches down and feels the ghost blood on his back from the bullet wound.

After this completely out of the blue, could NEVER have seen it coming revelation, Malcolm returns to his sleeping wife.

“I think I can go now,” he tells her. “Just needed to do a couple things.” He tells her he loves her and that she was never second to his big-time career, and the fade-to-white seems to imply that he won’t be there (corporeal or non) when she wakes.

Pardon my language, but this blew my FUCKING mind. Could ANYONE HAVE SEEN THIS COMING??

Also—Anna gets what every woman wants more than anything, which is a husband who will absolutely never leave you and a boyfriend.

WHAT A TWIST!!!!!!!!!

Now, my question for you in the comments: Did Cole know that Malcolm was dead the whole time??? I can plausibly argue that he might not have; unlike with the other ghosts, there’s nothing (outwardly) gruesome about a man in sport coats following you around and the coats would’ve covered the wound. Still, Cole must be able to tell the difference between the living and the dead, right?? Although they do all appear at the same visual register to us, the audience. Hmmmm… I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.

(Three-and-a-half stars)