Every Heart-Stopping M. Night Shyamalan Movie, Ranked

Even Shyamalan’s most ardent defenders find it hard to go to bat for his adaptation of the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. Even without getting into the controversial whitewashed casting, there’s little to recommend here. Shyamalan struggles to squeeze a 20-episode season of television into 90 minutes, leaving at the door the vibrant personalities of the main characters. When a great sacrifice is made near the end of the show’s first season, it carries real emotional weight. In the film, the character who dies has barely had five minutes of screentime, and it generates little more than a yawn. If the film matches or improves on the series at all, it’s in the action. Shyamalan presents the fights in wide master shots that give the choreography room to breathe. It’s just about the only thing to appreciate in an otherwise disastrous misfire.

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Shot in 1995, the film was subjected to editing shenanigans courtesy of Harvey Weinstein and was shelved for three years, until Shyamalan’s buzzy sale of The Sixth Sense’s script made it seem worth releasing after all. The film follows a precocious ten-year-old who goes on a quest to speak to God after the death of his grandfather. Set at the same Philly Catholic school Shyamalan attended himself as a child, the film is suffused with a charming specificity of time and place (Rosie O’Donnell plays a Phillies-loving nun who explains the betrayal of Christ with a baseball metaphor) that elevates it above its anodyne genre. Still, it’s far from the kind of work Shyamalan would do later. The family dynamics in particular feel like a dry run for material he’d knock out of the park in The Sixth Sense.

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More accomplished formally than Wide Awake despite being the earlier film, Shyamalan’s debut was a student film produced while he was at NYU. He confidently steps in front of the camera as Dev Raman, an American college student sent to live in India after violently retaliating against a bully. The culture-clash elements are explored perhaps sensitively, perhaps to a fault. At every step, it’s apparent that this is the work of an idealistic 22-year-old. But Shyamalan deploys a light touch in places that leavens the heavy-handed subject matter, and even on a degraded VHS rip (the only way to see the film, nowadays) it’s clear that his eye for composition was there from the beginning.

Critics lambasted Shyamalan for metatextual haughtiness in Lady in the Water, if not for his self-insert as a writer of cosmic importance than for his depiction of a film critic as an arrogant blowhard. The film feels like Shyamalan chafing against expectations he never intended to set for himself, a gonzo fairytale far removed from the “elevated” genre milieu of his breakouts. Sadly, it doesn’t really come together. The performances are heightened to the point of irritation, and it’s hard not to roll one’s eyes at the constant discussions of “narfs” and “scrunts” and “great eatlons.” It’s a messy film from a director who typically displays composure even in his wildest formal freakouts.

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An odd entry in Shyamalan’s canon, this family-friendly sci-fi film came out at a time when his name was so radioactive that it was deliberately kept out of the marketing. A thousand years after humanity leaves Earth, the terrifically named Cypher Raige (Will Smith), a legendary soldier, crash lands with his inexperienced son Kitai (Jaden Smith) on the abandoned planet. Serviceable as an adventure film, After Earth is mostly interesting for how it uses its leads. Will Smith, one of cinema history’s most luminously charismatic stars, maintains a teeth-grinding grimace as Cypher, who has mastered the ability to repress his emotions. Jaden, meanwhile, is genuinely compelling as a confused kid trying and failing to imitate his father’s stone-faced seriousness. After Earth went down like a lead balloon with critics all too eager to convict the Smiths on the charge of nepotism. It’s not as bad as all that, but it’s fair to remember it as a pit stop on Shyamalan’s road to redemption.

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This was Shyamalan’s breakout for a reason. The Sixth Sense is a little mannered compared to his later work, but it’s still a shockingly effective thriller that conceals its seminal twist beautifully. On rewatch, you notice the tricky way Shyamalan plays on the audience’s understanding of film grammar. Therapist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) appears and disappears from the narrative in an almost spectral fashion, and it’s only by the ending that you realize why hasn’t had a continuous off-screen presence. And what more is there to say about the brilliance of Haley Joel Osment? As Cole Sear (seer, get it?) he gives one of cinema history’s all-time great child performances. His terrified whispered confession that “I see dead people” was an instant piece of pop culture zeitgeist.

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One of Shyamalan’s purest horror forays, Signs concerns a family in an isolated farmhouse dealing with the impact (both distant and immediate) of an alien invasion. The film seems eerily prescient nowadays, with its note-perfect depiction of what it fees like to watch horrifying, major historical events through screens while locked up and isolated. It may be Shyamalan’s most perfectly paced film, ratcheting up the tension bit by bit as the aliens go from chillingly hypothetical observers to terrifyingly real home invaders. It also has most of his best scares, including a classic bit of televised found-footage which presaged his later film The Visit.

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Yes, I’ll say it: This is Shyamalan’s most misunderstood film. Lambasted at release for its befuddling tone and premise (a tree-based virus causes humans worldwide to spontaneously commit suicide), The Happening earned a “so bad it’s good” status from a viewing public now certain that Shyamalan had no idea what he was doing. But was that a fair assessment? Can one really watch the scene where a terrified Mark Wahlberg pleads with a potted plant not to kill him, only to realize it’s made of plastic, and not think that perhaps the comedy may have been intentional? The Happening was inspired by sci-fi B-movies of the ’50s and ’60s, a purposeful mix of corny humor and shockingly gruesome horror. If you don’t buy that, though, it’s okay. The Happening is also exceptionally prescient. It’s revealed halfway through that the suicide virus targets large groups of humans, forcing our heroes to pare down their companions more and more until they’re eventually forced to isolate themselves individually. Anyone who was separated from loved ones during Covid lockdowns is liable to be touched by the climactic moments where the heroes decide they would rather die together than live apart.

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Unbreakable was an ahead-of-its-time deconstruction of superhero narratives. Glass is less deconstruction and more destruction. A sequel to both Unbreakable and Split, Glass finds the superpowered leads of both films institutionalized by a sinister doctor (Sarah Paulson) who tries to convince them that their abilities are nothing more than mental illness. The best thing about Glass is how committed it is to anti-climax, denying fans their fan service in a similar fashion to The Matrix Resurrections. The promised confrontation between David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and the Horde (James McAvoy) is over and done within the first 20 minutes. A climactic showdown at an unfinished skyscraper is teased throughout the film, only to have things end ignominiously in a parking lot before the characters can ever get there. It’s a bleak rebuke of contemporary superhero cinema, a film where the heroes cannot win and viewers walk away with little catharsis. Not exactly a recipe for a crowd-pleaser, but a brisk and necessary response to a genre that has engulfed the medium.

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Though the majority of his scripts are original, Shyamalan showed his skill with adaptation with Knock at the Cabin, based on the Paul Tremblay novel The Cabin at the End of the World. The setup is potent: two men and their daughter rent an isolated cabin, where they are set upon by four strangers who insist that the family must sacrifice one of their own to prevent the apocalypse. The novel plays this premise for straightforward thrills, but Shyamalan digs a bit deeper into its moral nuances. Of particular note is how he draws connections between the queerness of the lead characters and their ethical dilemma. How much do these two men really owe to a world that has rejected and oppressed them their entire lives? The standout here, of course, is Dave Bautista as the leader of the apocalyptic heralds, a gentle giant clearly pained by the horror he’s been compelled to inflict. Bautista reads every line like he’s struggling to breathe, literally suffocating under the weight of his terrible responsibility. It’s a performance decision that feels right at home with Shyamalan, whose actors have always been unfairly accused of turning in stilted work.

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A B-movie premise gets the A-level treatment in Split. James McAvoy is a man with 23 alternate personalities jockeying for control of his body, several of them organizing serial kidnappings and murders to appease the buried 24th persona they believe is waiting to emerge. This is the trashiest of narrative frameworks, but in Shyamalan’s hands it becomes a shockingly sensitive portrayal of victims of child abuse. The young girls McAvoy kidnaps early in the film aren’t just a crop of teenage scream queens; one (played beautifully by Anya Taylor-Joy) is a rape survivor whose advice to her fellow captives is striking in its frankness. “Trauma” is an irritating buzzword in horror these days, but Shyamalan explores it with such generous empathy that you sometimes forget you’re watching a film about a man whose multiple-personality disorder gives him the power to climb on the ceiling. The final reveal that it’s all along been a stealth-sequel to Unbreakable contributed to Split’s massive success with audiences; the self-funded film made 30 times its budget at the box office.

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It’s easy for someone who goes to bat for Shyamalan’s later works to dismiss Unbreakable, the last of his films to receive any real critical respect, in favor of his more gonzo later works. Unfortunately, it really is just that good. Shyamalan turns the superhero origin story into a whispered domestic drama, where awakening to one’s supernatural abilities seems empowering only insofar as it enables living a normal life. Bruce Willis imbues impervious hero David Dunn with remarkable vulnerability. His scenes with his son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) are the film’s strongest, particularly a wrenching scene where Joseph takes extreme measures to prove his father’s immunity to bullets. And you can’t talk about Unbreakable without mentioning Samuel L. Jackson as Elijah “Mr. Glass” Price, whose final scene gives me goosebumps no matter how many times I see it.

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Some of M. Night’s most brilliantly deranged filmmaking is on display in Old, for better and….well, really just for better. Shyamalan shoots this tale of vacationers trapped on a beach that rapidly ages them like an artist with nothing to lose. Characters are shoved so far to the edges of the frame that they’re sometimes half-obscured, entire scenes occur without a single line of dialogue being spoken by someone currently on-screen, the camera tilts and rolls and spins with liberatory aplomb. It’s one of Shyamalan’s scariest films, fearlessly pushing the limits of on-screen body horror in ways both disgusting (a woman emerges from the darkness of a cave with all her limbs broken) and emotionally affecting (a couple spends their last moments in the quiet bliss of new found senility). The film also contains one of Shyamalan’s cheekiest cameos, as a resort employee-slash-conspirator who blithely documents the beach’s victims from afar.

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The comeback trail for Shyamalan (with general audiences, anyway) began in 2015 with The Visit, a curiously experimental outing that saw him take a stab at a horror mode which seemed to be in its death throes: the found footage movie. Teen siblings Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) embark on a week-long trip to see the grandparents they’ve never met, recording their stay for a documentary about their mother’s shattered relationship with her parents. Shyamalan plays the awkward growing pains that accompany meeting new relatives for both unsettling chills and surprising comedy. The film probes the performativity of familial roles with precision—both the teens and their grandparents are playing roles, and chafing against the expectations accompanied by them. For pure formal inventiveness, this would rank highest in Shyamalan’s filmography; his use of found footage is destabilizing, eschewing the genre’s typical first-person-POV shots for something altogether stranger. We see this best in a terrifying game of hide-and-seek underneath a house’s foundation, where all laws of physical space seem to break down when faced with the simple terror of being chased by a monster.

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As far as public perception goes, The Village was the beginning of Shyamalan’s downfall, the last acceptable effort before he became a punchline. That’s partially down to pre-release hysteria: the Shyamalan twist had become such a staple that the production was shrouded in secrecy, and the ending had to be reshot after a draft of the script was leaked. What film could possibly live up to such scrutiny? The truth is, though, that Shyamalan here reached heights he has yet to top. This Bush-era fable features a 19th-century village in Pennsylvania (natch) whose younger citizens begin to mistrust the seemingly arbitrary rules which supposedly keep them safe from unseen monsters lurking in the woods. The film features a common contemporary Shyamalan theme—the foibles of parents trying to protect their children—from the opposite perspective. The Village is Shyamalan’s most romantic film, not just for the tender love story between Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) but for the dreamy sweep of its storytelling. It manages to make the tiny hamlet of its title feel epic in scope and scale. The film features the best single image of Shyamalan’s filmography, of Ivy’s hand blindly reaching out into the beast-filled darkness, holding onto nothing but the faith that her lover will reach her in time. It’s a shot that seems to embody everything important about Shyamalan as an artist, a beautiful tribute to the twin powers of love and belief.

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