Beal ( Joseph Cross) and his quest to literally talk to God after the traumatizing death of his grandfather ( Robert Loggia) is told with whiplash-inducing tonal shifts. He's a visual architect of the highest order, his screenplays blend thrills and heart in powerfully emotional ways, and even his most venomously regarded films are too strange, too idiosyncratic, too human to simply disregard.īut without the later-found skeleton of horror, Wide Awake plays too loosely and inconsistently to make any kind of mark other than befuddlement. I have long admired (and at times apologized for) the man's work. While just about every cinephile can agree that, say, Paul Thomas Andersonhas been a very good filmmaker throughout his career, Shyamalan tends to prompt more debate on metrics both micro and macro. This metatextual character arc, this directorial rise-fall-rise story structure makes Shyamalan a particularly fascinating filmmaker. Moreover, he and his work seemed changed. The Sixth Sense's Shyamalan was still the auteur behind these intentional films, but in some crucial ways, he seemed different. His budgets became lower, his premises became tighter, and his love of genre became purified. Starting with 2015's The Visit, Shyamalan found a kind of re-renaissance. Night Shyamalan film" began to carry a stigma I remember distinctly seeing the trailer for Devil, a 2010 film that Shyamalan produced but did not direct, and hearing raucous, disgusted laughter explode when his name splashed across the screen.
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While this period is full of genuine experimentation for the director - moving away from the horror genre, adapting material, working with other screenwriters, trying his hand at big-budget blockbuster cinema - it's also full of genuine strife. Your mileage may vary as to which film signified the beginning of the end for Shyamalan's original period of acclaim, but once he started producing critically and culturally derided work in the 2000s, he did not stop for some time.
Night Shyamalan film" carried meaning and weight, especially at its caboose Shyamalan's most resonant (if reductive) legacy became his utilization of the ending plot twist, a canny bit of writing trickery that recontextualized everything we saw before. His talents were celebrated, his craft compared to masters like Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg, his name calcified into a brand. After breaking through with 1999's The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan went on a precocious, meteoric rise to the top. Night Shyamalan is one of our most curious and deservedly debated filmmakers working today.
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