There aren’t many filmmakers as wildly inconsistent as M. Night Shyamalan.
Entering the film industry in the early 1990s, Shyamalan quickly earned a reputation as the dramatic successor to Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock – a creative juggernaut known for his impressive genre work and the famously shocking twist endings to his films. By the mid 2000s, however, Shyamalan’s directorial esteem started to significantly wane, leading to such universally panned disappointments as The Happening, The Last Airbender, and the near-unwatchable After Earth.
Fortunately, in more recent years, Shyamalan has experienced something of a career resurgence, thanks in large part to the success of his 2016 thriller, Split. With the upcoming arrival of Shyamalan’s newest film, Trap, we thought we’d take a look back at Shyamalan’s greatest movies to date, ranking them in order from worst to best.
While most of Shyamalan’s earliest movies met with rampant critical and commercial success, The Village was the first entry in Shyamalan’s filmography where critics seemed to doubt the director’s once promising future as an up-and-coming filmmaker. Set in an apparent 19th century town plagued by monstrous creatures, The Village’s infamous twist ending left most viewers more perplexed than truly shocked, accounting for the film’s lack of esteem among more contemporary audiences today.
Shyamalan has usually done his best work following a string of subpar films or, at the very least, a terrifically underwhelming flop. Case in point with Knock at the Cabin, the director’s better-than-average follow-up to his egregiously disappointing Glass. Like all the best Shyamalan movies, Knock at the Cabin forces viewers to wonder about the legitimacy of its narrative claims, debating whether the fate of the world is really in jeopardy – or whether it’s all the shared hallucinations of a paranoid cult.
The last great film of Shyamalan’s early career, Signs is not without its subtle weaknesses, including an abrupt ending that makes no logical sense in the context of the movie. (Why would a hostile alien species whose weakness is water invade Earth – a planet whose surface is 70% water?) Disappointing ending aside, Shyamalan captured a fantastically taut sense of suspense through the initial two acts of Signs, making us all fear swaying Pennsylvania corn fields the same way Jaws made us terrified of the open ocean 30 years prior.
Though nowhere near as well-known as most of Shyamalan’s other films, The Visit happens to rank as one of the director’s overall strongest thrillers in quite some time. Before his critical resurgence with 2016’s Split, Shyamalan created an unforgettably tense psychological thriller with The Visit, a Hitchcockian project that utilized its found footage presentation to maximum narrative effect.
Without a doubt Shyamalan’s best film since 2002’s Signs, there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to Split. A first-rate psychological horror film with elements of a thriller and superhero film woven into its plot, Split unquestionably served as Shyamalan’s return to form, not to mention outfitting its lead star, James McAvoy, with one of his most impressive roles to date. Though its immediate sequel (Glass) failed to live up to everyone’s expectations, dedicated fans of Shyamalan’s work can always fondly admire this extraordinary 2016 blockbuster.
Almost a decade before Kevin Feige laid the foundation for the fledgling Marvel Cinematic Universe, Shyamalan offered a far more harrowing portrayal of the superhero genre with his 2000 masterpiece, Unbreakable. An intelligent deconstruction of the conventional superhero narrative, Unbreakable wondered aloud, “What if Superman was here on Earth, but didn’t know he was Superman?” Exploring that simple idea to its fullest potential, Shyamalan created a movie well ahead of its day and age, predating the more realistic portrayal of superheroes featured in The Dark Knight Trilogy, Iron Man, or ABC’s Heroes.
Any movie that trailed behind Star Wars: The Phantom Menace as the second highest-earning film of 1999 is likely worth seeing. Fortunately, The Sixth Sense lives up to its iconic reputation among modern viewers, remaining every bit as enjoyable now as it did two and a half decades ago. Though most people probably know its famous twist ending by now, The Sixth Sense’s original premise never fails to disappoint, roping audiences in with its subtle but affecting story, engaging performances, and unorthodox take on the traditional ghost story.
