The World Moves for Love
The Cinema of M. Night Shyamalan
This unpublished piece was intended to be included in a book that was cancelled after its publisher went under. It was written before the release of Split (2016) and Glass (2019) which necessitate a significant degree of revision or expansion that I hope to explore in the near future. See also my review of Shyamalan’s latest film, Old, here.
“The world moves for love”
One of the most emotionally stirring and complex moments in M. Night Shyamalan’s oeuvre is when William Hurt’s character Edward in The Village (2004) says the above words. On one level, it reads like a summation for all of Shyamalan’s cinema, which is unabashedly emotional and spiritual. But on the other, it’s a line read by a character orchestrating an illusion, having fabricated an elaborate lie in order to maintain a small community’s division from the pains of modern society. In a sense, The Village is a reversal of the films that had at that point made Shyamalan a household name. Whereas The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002) had revolved around the unexplainable being affirmed—ghosts are among us, a character is invincible, and aliens (and perhaps God) are real—The Village’s fantastical element, that there are dangerous creatures in the forest, is revealed to be a tactic to instill fear in the villagers in order to ensure nobody leaves, which would consequentially spoil their temporally-immune zone. Another reversal: instead of a male protagonist, a father trying to reconcile with his family, the main character is a blind girl who sees through the lies of her father. The Village is a deeply philosophical film that poses troubling questions to the viewer. What’s especially complex here is the way that Shyamalan at once builds an effective critique of society’s manipulative leaders and still delivers his sincerest and most romantic love story.
The ending of the film is both damning and transcendent. As William Hurt and the others who constructed “the village” all stand together around the bed-ridden Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) and hear the news that Noah (Adrien Brody) has been killed, having been mistaken by Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) as a monster, they decide to use his death as a way of preserving the fear their society depends on, and to keep their lie alive. In the composition, they fill the frame—one of many images, including the film’s very first, of a mob of villagers crowding the frame—with slight room for the doorway from which Ivy appears and splits through them as she approaches Lucius and kneels at his side. The world moves for love. The village may be fake, but love is real. In several shots throughout the film, Ivy is seen standing apart from the group or somehow breaking it up within the composition. Her blindness, symbolic of her purity and naiveté, enable her to stand outside of the groupthink. Love empowers her to navigate through lies.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
– Dev Raman, Praying With Anger
To describe Shyamalan’s cinema as succinctly as possible, it is a cinema of the invisible. His films, we at first misunderstood, asked to be read a certain way, as puzzles to be amused by, but this is not the case. Shyamalan wants us to believe. Full stop. But what does he want us to believe in? His films actively criticize black and white worldviews, deception and manipulation, they resist the simplicity that they at first offer us. The power of stories, and the power to recognize them as stories are equally important. The nondenominational spirituality that is a perpetual undercurrent and guiding force in Shyamalan’s movies, a cocktail of the Hinduism and the Christianity that the Indian-born but American-raised director was exposed to at an early age. It’s naïve to read too deeply into his upbringing for these answers, but one gets the impression that Shyamalan’s faith is informed by an understanding of the common denominators of these respective belief systems, and recognizing in them love as the prevailing force. The very makeup of his storytelling feels formed by this collision: cause and effect rationalism of the West versus overt, mythic and mystic aspects of the East.
M. Night Shyamalan offers several problems for the modern movie viewer. He had already begun to lose favor in the movie-going unconscious after IMDb forum buzzards and their ilk started to wise up to the implausibility and illogic of his previous movies, picking apart the plot details of a movie about aliens. A sincere filmmaker working during insincere times, Shyamalan is at odds with contemporary cinema, making overtly spiritual, emotional, heart-on-its-sleeve pictures that ask you to take leaps of faith, to believe in the implausible. The religiosity in his cinema is present from the beginning in Praying with Anger (1992) and Wide Awake (1998), two immature films usually discounted from his body of work that while minor are certainly not made without formal skill. A purveyor of fairy tales, ghost stories, and fables whose films look silly when stacked against the logic-driven or post-modern movies we’re accustomed to in this young century, he simply makes people uncomfortable and isn’t palatable to modern audiences.
If you asked someone to describe the ending of Shyamalan’s films, you’d likely hear a recount of their “twists”: Bruce Willis is dead, Samuel L. Jackson’s character is a villain, the aliens are vulnerable to water and all of the coincidences line up, the village is fake, etc. The twists in his films are moments of reconfiguration that alter the meaning of what had come before. They aren’t gimmicks—though in retrospect The Sixth Sense does feel most like the work of a trickster—but rather have emotional consequences that are key to the film’s themes. The twists aren’t the endings, which are better described in intellectual and emotional terms than as plot-literal events. The reflexive nuance of The Village’s conclusion isn’t his first on that level, but his films were quickly overshadowed by a misplaced obsession with their plots and twists and an impatience towards his penchant for creating stories that purposefully push beyond reason.
“Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world, to not know why you're here.”
– Elijah, Unbreakable
The themes of hiding, and constructing lies in order to do so, is a theme that runs through The Sixth Sense to The Village: Willis convinces himself he’s alive in Sixth Sense, and then as David in Unbreakable ignores his own “super power”, while Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah (or “Mr. Glass”) constructs a falsely simplistic world view that costs lives. Shyamalan wants characters to push through and embrace themselves, to be who they are, and he wants viewers to believe in stories but at the same time understand their place as myth. Acts of faith set us free, so long as it is in the name of moving closer together rather than recoiling in isolation.
At their best, his movies strive towards a pure cinema founded on rich visual storytelling. Capable of creating expressive cinematic sequences at a level rare in contemporary Hollywood, Shyamalan has the formal chops of a Spielberg but his virtuosity is at times even more overtly apparent. Look at the opening of Unbreakable, where a laterally moving camera peeks between the seats at David, and in shot reverse-shot with a child seated in front of him. We see his wedding ring, the camera tracks to reveal an attractive woman and an exposed tattoo as she puts her baggage in the overhead, tracking back to show us his gaze and the removal of his ring. Once she rejects him, we cut back to where the child was, now gone, and back to him, defeated. We know everything we need to about this character and his marriage. The next scene with David is equally stunning, as he awakes in the hospital, framed in wide in the background with a person’s slowly bleeding-out body in the foreground, establishing David’s remarkable survival by contrasting it with the death of the other last remaining person from the crash, all of this being told through image.
Shyamalan knows precisely where to place the camera. His films have a heavily storyboarded look to them, complete with overhead shots; tracking in every direction; push-ins and pull-outs; his mise en scène is always calculated, telling us something specific. But for all of this formal marvel, and yes the occasionally verbally overstatedness of his films, Shyamalan has a subtlety to his work. Maybe this combination of subtle, quiet attention to detail and the surface-level emotiveness—a perpetual show and tell—throws viewers off the scent. He favors long takes (another quality that distinguishes him from many contemporaries), creating intricate visual patterns and motifs, and is relatively averse to depictions of violence and action. When he does film violence he does so in unusual ways. The climax of Unbreakable frames David and the murderous home invader he’s tracked down through a window, glimpsed in between curtains flowing in the wind (a shot recalled recently by the more celebrated grace of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s mise en scène in 2015’s The Assassin) as they face off. The encounter with the alien at the end of Signs is largely obscured, shot in reflections and from the POV of the alien itself, ultimately becoming peripheral to the emotional core of the scene in which the unconscious young boy Morgan (Rory Culkin) is revived by his father, Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), now empowered by his restored faith having recognized a series of coincidences as signs from God. This makes you wonder about how ill-fitted Shyamalan was for helming a blockbuster like The Last Airbender (2010), and indeed that film loses control of itself during the CGI-packed set pieces, but retains touches of beauty when the camera is moving around, emphasizing the poise of the combatants.
Many scenes stand out for their formal construction, such as in The Village in what may be his best sequence when Ivy is standing on her porch with her hand outstretched as the “creatures” approach, with the faith that Lucius will come to ensure she’s ok, and in slow-motion he grabs her, closing the door behind them as they hide in the cellar. Sometimes there’s a less obvious elegance to great Shyamalan scenes. There’s the guessing game scene in The Sixth Sense, it’s simple but tightly directed. Malcolm (Willis) convinces Cole (Haley Joel Osment), who is hesitant to speak with him, to play a game where if Malcolm guesses something correctly, Cole takes a step forward, incorrectly and he takes a step back. At first, Malcolm’s guesses are correct, and Cole takes a few steps forward in a row, each time getting closer to the camera. The sequence begins in medium-wides on both of them, then switches to mediums, then close-ups, until Malcolm gets a series of incorrect guesses, and step by step and shot by shot, the boy and the camera return to their initial positions.
He has worked with immensely talented collaborators, in particular cinematographers, having made three films with Tak Fujimoto (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Happening) and memorably having worked with Roger Deakins on The Village and Christopher Doyle on The Lady and the Water (2005). Everything from The Sixth Sense up to The Visit (2015) was scored by James Newton Howard, who created some of his best work. Shyamalan has an uncanny ability of casting and directing child actors (the lead of The Visit, Olivia DeJonge, being his latest triumph), as well as eliciting unusually tender performances from famous actors we wouldn’t expect it from (Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, Mark Wahlberg).
“Man thinks they are each alone in this world. It is not true”
– Story, The Lady in the Water
An oft-misunderstood component of Shyamalan’s work is his goofy sense of humour which undercuts the seriousness of his films. It’s been there since day one, but when The Lady in the Water (2005) came out, with equal parts silliness and an air of profundity, his fate was sealed. With the critics already turning against him, Shyamalan pushed the envelope even further by making a film in retaliation. Not only does The Lady in the Water cast Bob Balaban as a scumbag film critic, who is devoured on screen by a creature known as a scrunt (the most regrettable moment in his career, it contradicts his typical compassion for the sake of petty revenge), but the entire film brings things to new levels of implausibility, preposterousness, and questionable plotting. At one point, when a young boy magically reads secret messages on his cereal boxes, you can almost see Shyamalan’s middle finger directed towards those who have questioned his films on logical grounds. Incredibly ambitious, the film is set in a mundane single location, an apartment building known as The Cove, and makes storytelling its subject, deconstructing its process in plain view while still asking us to believe in it.
The whole film is predicated on the characters, most of them strangers, taking a leap of faith together. Bryce Dallas Howard’s water nymph is even named Story. Plot details and revelations are miraculously revealed by different people in the building, bit by bit. The acquiring of these findings becomes arbitrary, and in turn it becomes about accepting them regardless of their delivery. Trust the “Story” and it may heal you in return. This is what happens to Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a stuttering widower who has given up on life until Story’s arrival gives him purpose. While flawed, it’s one of Shyamalan’s most beautiful movies, reaching visual and emotional peaks on par with his highest achievements. In one scene, Cleveland holds Story, who has been badly injured and is unconscious, and the “chosen” strangers from the building gather round and put their hands on him, he starts to apologize to his deceased family and declaring how much he misses them. Story heals in his arms, and he has reached a catharsis. Believe in the unbelievable and draw power from it. The unfashionability here reaches audacious heights when the final scene has a giant eagle come grab Story to take her home. The stunning final images are shot from beneath the pool—itself having been established in overhead shots as an eye-shaped motif, the gateway to a world of guardians—showing a distorted Cleveland as he looks to the skies, he himself being watched. Boldly, the film argues that the power of storytelling lies equally in the responsibility of the person reading/watching it unfold.
The Happening is another peculiar case, an environmental horror film that pays homage to atomic age B-movies that put off audiences with its premise in which plants create an airborne toxin that makes people suicidal, and an occasional goofiness that clashes with some of his most deathly serious scenes. The film is best viewed straight up, without the ironic tongue-in-cheek some think it has. It plays up post-9/11 and climate change anxieties, and is by far Shyamalan’s most punishing movie, with a staggering body count. Featuring his most frightening scene, of people stopping in their tracks, acting strangely and killing themselves in various ways, the self-inflicted nature of the deaths becomes a metaphor for both the media-bred terrorist paranoia and the environmental catastrophes we suffer at our own hands. The imagery of construction workers leaping off a building to their deaths draws from 9/11 imagery with horrifying results. That the film is centered around an almost fluffy story of a troubled couple, a science teacher named Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) and Alma (Zooey Deschanel) seems like an awkward fit, but has a huge emotional payoff in the film’s climax when they throw caution to the wind (literally) to touch each other one last time, risking their lives in the open air and finding it suddenly safe. Again, Shyamalan consciously tries to subvert his reputation for twist endings by only confirming Elliot’s initial guess that it could be the plants, and yet leaves the occurrence unexplainable.
Seen as unmitigated disasters, Shyamalan’s next two films, The Last Airbender and After Earth (2013), earned him more vitriol than any major director in recent memory aside from George Lucas. Airbender is a grossly miscalculated film, but not one without moments of beauty. On the other hand, the flawed After Earth is quite special in spite of its shortcomings. Originating with Will Smith, the film was inorganically conceived for Smith to star in it with his son, Jayden Smith. Dramatically, it’s severely undercooked, and the characterizations of the father and son character are thin, but once Jayden Smith’s Kitai has crash landed on Earth and is separated from his father Cypher (Smith), the film becomes surprisingly intimate, cutting between him and his dad, who sits injured on their wrecked spaceship, guiding his son as best he can. Less cluttered with CGI than Airbender, the film is more aesthetically restrained, and more thoughtful. One blockbuster misfire and a flawed but unique for-hire project hardly seem like enough evidence for a director in serious decline, but that doesn’t mean that The Visit didn’t surprise.
A found-footage horror film seemed like the last sort of project a filmmaker as storyboard-specific in his craft as Shyamalan would take on and yet he managed to make one that fulfills its genre requirements of formal plausibility while still demonstrating expertise in placement of the camera. He works within the codes of the subgenre while managing to apply his classical values to a modern form. The camera is deployed in a number of ways—peeking around corners, fly-on-the-wall sequences, direct address, webcam, still, moving—giving The Visit an unusual amount of visual variety for a found-footage film. Interactions between fore- and background within shots, and montage between perspectives, are unassumingly yet meticulously constructed. One intense sequence is a perfectly executed game in which the lead youngsters Becca and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) play hide and seek under the house, each with a camera. Things are fun at first before Nana mischievously joins in, the children’s respective frames—they both wield cameras, and Shyamalan ingeniously cuts between them for maximal effect—revealing her creepily crawling around behind them.
Early on, in a masterful long take that would fit inside any of Shyamalan’s films, the mom waves goodbye playfully to her kids as their train starts to chug forward, framed from the children’s POV from inside, she runs along, at first jokingly, before she starts to cry as they pull out of view—this is when Shyamalan’s credit graces the screen, a punctuation mark on this signature shot. The empathy in that moment carries through The Visit and expands in unexpected ways. As with most of his films, a repeat viewing yields new emotional resonances. Like with The Sixth Sense, which on a first go is about Bruce Willis helping Haley Joel Osment, but on a second is about Osment helping Willis, The Visit has a similar dynamic. The psychopathic elderly couple that are revealed not to be the children’s grandparents, and who we discover murdered their own children, are malicious on a first viewing and heartbreakingly tragic on a second. In a filmography full of familial reconciliations—often from beyond the grave (Malcolm and his wife, Hess and his wife, Cleveland and his family)—this mentally ill couple can’t undo their horror and seem bent on repeating it as acts of deranged self-punishment. The film’s saddest shot occurs right after they first introduce themselves to the kids: we briefly glimpse them alone, embracing, shot through murky glass.
The phenomenon of The Sixth Sense and Shyamalan’s “brand” framed the perception of his subsequent movies in a reductive way. Admittedly, this partly stems from his own structural choices, and his perceived egotistical cameo appearances also led some viewers astray. Unfairly boiled down to his twists and the supposed fallibility of his scripts, the real mysteries of M. Night Shyamalan’s work remain mostly unattended to. His mise en scène is rife with clues to deeper meanings largely passed over. It’s in empty chairs in The Village, signals of loss and the inescapable ghosts of the past. It’s in grasped hands, interlocked gazes and embraces. The twisting upside-down eagle-eye shot that tells us what we need to know about Elijah’s relationship to comic books in Unbreakable. The skill with which important details are blocked and revealed in the frame in Signs, the way the camera recedes in pain. Plays of focus in The Lady in the Water. The real estate billboard that reads, “You deserve this!” in The Happening. It’s in the water that courses through his oeuvre. His is a cinema of faith, of reconciliation, and of illusions transcended by love for which the world bends and shifts, seeming to stretch reality past our understanding into the domain of the spiritual.
