Formal Film Study: M. Night Shyamalan

M. Night Shyamalan is the butt of more movie jokes than any other director in the business. I was curious to see how a director who's so horrible could be so famous and get such big name actors in his movies. So, I designed my study around M. Night Shyamalan movies known for their twist. After research, I ended up choosing The Sixth Sense, The Village, and Unbreakable. These being some of his older movies, they are know to be better than his current work, including After Earth, known for being arguably the worst movie of the year.

Briefly, Unbreakable is about Samuel L Jackson believing Bruce Willis is a super hero, and doing everything in his power to convince him. The Village is the story of a small 1800s town surrounded by forests, known to be filled with evil red beasts who will not let villagers pass through. Last, The Sixth Sense is about a psychologist for a boy who as the famous quote tells us, sees dead people. All these films are unique in plot, but are told similarly by M. Night.

The Village

The color in all the films is unique from most films. They all have standard, realistic shades and appearances, but choose to stress a certain color at a certain time. In The Village it's red. The evil creatures are red, so any red found in the village is immediately buried. As a result, when red enters the frame it shines brighter than the rest of the scene, and demands attention from the viewer. Similarly in Unbreakable, the scenes are average until we need to focus on one thing, which rather than being framed as most important explodes with color, in this case during flashes Bruce Willis has of crime. Lastly, The Sixth Sense used shot types more than color, but M. Night did choose to use color to make religious statues stand out in times when the boy was scared, as they protected him from the dead people he believed he was seeing.

The Sixth Sense

This brings me to my larger focus, the cinematography of the films. Here, there is a lot that all the films have in common.  In interactions between characters, M. Night frequently makes a choice to use one shot, but pan back and forth as the speaker changes, of then leaving one completely out of the frame before panning back. I thought this was unique because one continuous shot would end up framing the same scene multiple different ways. When scenes would suddenly become frantic, using the camera to swing into a new framed shot would become completely natural. Shifting from a close up to a long shot with a quick pan was completely natural in a scene, without having to pick up the pace of the editing and create artificial angst rather than use the natural tension created in the scene.

The other cinematographic aspect unique to M. Night was his placement of objects in the foreground of his shots, especially when they didn't interact with the scene. In all three movies, an object or person will be framed in the bottom right hand part of the screen, and then the subject enters the frame late. This choice didn't disorient the shot, but rather framed where it was taking place  an allowed for the scene to play out with something dominating the lower half of the frame, but not the shot. This was unique to me, but felt very normal.

Unbreakable

The other main aspects I found to be specific of Shyamalan were his use of low fill lighting in intense scenes, not allowing us to see sometimes more than half of an actors face and a use of symbols. M. Night often used recurring symbols when cutting between scenes, many of which made no sense until the very end.

This brings me to what makes M. Night Shyamalan who he is, the twist. SPOILER ALERT to anyone who hasn't seen these movies yet. In all three, information given in the last five minutes completely overturns the viewer's entire understanding of the plot. In all three movies I had to sit as the credits rolled and wonder how the pieces had to fit together with this single piece of new information. In The Sixth Sense, we learn that not only was the boy actually seeing ghosts, but that his psychologist was one! The wife who we thought was ignoring him was mourning his death! In The Village we discover that our helpless little town wasn't living in the 1800s at all. Our main character wanders onto a highway! Luckily, she's blind and has no idea so she cannot ruin the elder's secrets including that they live in a modern wild life reservation and they dress up as the killer beasts! This one was a little less believable, and a little more of the expected let down we're supposed to expect from M. Night. Lastly, we discover in the last minute of Unbreakable that Samauel L Jackson is the evil villain! He's killed hundreds of people trying to find a superhero! This was fun, believable within the context, and intense.

All of these sudden plot twists make their entire film a confused lie, which doesn't discredit the ride, but rather adds an entire new depth to the film (usually). These twists are fun, and all believable within  the realm of their movie. They are the most surprising endings to movies I have ever seen, and they truly made them an even bigger pleasure to watch.


So why is M. Night Shyamalan the laughing stock of bad movie endings? The answer is in his more recent work, which would more properly complete my study. Ultimately, he cannot be understood unless six or more movies are taken into account, which I haven't seen, but from research range from bad to absolutely horrible. Additionally, he tried to make a fake documentary about himself, but was found out, greatly hurting his image. M. Night Shyamalan started out as "the next Steven Spielberg" and now would be lucky to get above a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. I wish my study had followed all his works, but I was unaware of the serious drop off when I began. Of all the sources I found on him, this article seems to encompass the mystery of M. Night. In the end I recommend the movies of his that I have seen, but cannot speak to the supposedly horrible newer releases.
http://www.vulture.com/2013/05/the-buried-secret-of-m-night-shyamalan.html