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REVIEW Sad Spook-Fest An eerie film that balances the real and the unreal. Movie: THE SIXTH
SENSE By Anupama Chopra The Sixth Sense is that rarest of things: a ghost story that spooks your soul and stirs your emotions. It's creepy and scary and inexorably sad. Director Manoj "Night" Shyamalan ensures that while you may shut your eyes with fright in the theatre, you'll stay awake long into the night thinking about what scared you. Set in Philadelphia, the film tells the story of a child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), who comes home after receiving an award for his exemplary work, to find a half-naked man standing in his bedroom. It is an earlier patient who slipped through the cracks. Blaming Crowe for his unhinged condition, the patient shoots the doctor and then himself. Flash forward to a year later when a recovered Crowe is attempting to treat Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), an eight-year-old child with problems uncannily similar to the first patient. The two slowly develop a relationship and the little boy reveals his secret: he can see dead people. What follows is a spook-fest with a mind-bending ending. The film works devilishly well because it deftly walks the tightrope between the real and the unreal. This isn't the gore-filled horror of slasher flicks like Scream or even the God versus Devil conflict of an Exorcist. This is an ordinary world gone off-kilter. Using Gothic images of the city and a deliberate pacing, Shyamalan builds a chilling atmosphere. Dead bodies go in and out of the frame with startling nonchalance. Silence has rarely been scarier. And the performances do the rest. Willis, whose acting repertoire consists of one expression -- the smirk -- is surprisingly good as the angst-ridden doctor. But ultimately, the film belongs to Osment, who foregoes the usual movie-kid cuteness for an intensity and anguish that are bang on target. Sear's loneliness, his trauma of being the school freak, his inability to communicate with his mother and his desperate need for acceptance are heart-wrenching. This is easily the best kid performance of the year. Shyamalan has written a brilliant, multi-layered story. And it is perhaps his Indian roots, which allow him to be sensitive in a genre with little room for emotion. He directs with unstinting conviction. The Sixth Sense breaks new ground cinematically -- the horror movie bar has just been raised. |
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