The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan is an American supernatural horror drama film in 1999. The story tells the story of a nine-year-old boy Cole Sear claims to see dead people. Malcolm Crowe is a psychiatrist who survives from a shot by his former patients failed treatment. With the help of the doctor, the little boy finally lost his fear of ghosts, know how to get along with those ghosts, went out of his world and tell his true feelings to his mother. However, when audiences think it is a happy ending, the director let the boy’s mouth tell audiences that the psychiatrist already dead in the shot a year ago.
The film is highly logical. There will not be too much contradiction between plot arrangement and plot composition and the end. While watching the movie, the audience will not question the logic of the plot. As the basic elements of suspense horror movies, the strong visual impact and the scary music effect are fully used.
The biggest feature of this film is the complexity of its narrative structure. The director divides into two storylines, one is the romantic story between Malcolm and his wife and another is Cole and his mother. The narration is developed between the two storylines. Early clues make audience understanding of the film into confusion. Audiences will completely understand the whole story after the disclose at the end of this film. In this film, the director used temperature several times. There are times when the temperature drops and the characters breathe white. Among them, when Malcolm approaches his wife, she wraps her shawl tightly around her in her sleep, a clue that Malcolm is dead. But we won’t know the truth until we get to the end. Most viewers will be puzzled by this clue. On the whole, the film is chronological. With the experience of Cole and Malcolm and the passage of significant time, the narrative moves from being confined to omniscience. The audience is getting more clues.
Sources
https://www.ukessays.com/essays/film-studies/narrative-in-the-sixth-sense-film-studies-essay.php
https://offscreen.com/view/sixth_sense (Links to an external site.)
http://sarahthefilm.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-filmchosen-for-analysis-is-sixth.html