Trap (2024)

Inspired casting and a grim sense of humour help sustain the unlikely thrills in M Night Shyamalan's latest about a family man who learns police have him surrounded at a stadium concert and are closing in, but you spend a long time waiting for this "No Way Out" scenario to pop and not only does it never pop, there comes halfway through the movie a shift into a second and then third unwelcome act, as though even Shyamalan felt trapped by his plot contrivance, and rather than maintaining the black fun in these second and third add-on chapters things become mired in some especially unfun and longwinded expositon of the Psycho-endscene type.

★★★☆☆

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Old (2021)

No, director M. Night Shyamalan doesn't have an excuse for yet another lame ending because although this time his movie, a beach-based Picnic At Hanging Rock (a group of people lug picnic baskets to a beach only to discover they are trapped and inexplicably ageing there) is based on Sandcastle, a graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, Shyamalan actually changes the ending of the kooky Lost-like events, so the lame ending is his again, but up to that late point when the story turns rusty, he delivers a captivating fantasy horror thriller full of great acting, weird and wonderful ideas, a beautiful confined location like the stage of a theatre production, and of course his trademark cameo and camerawork, sweeping and overhead and long-take.

★★★☆☆

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Glass (2019)

** SPOILER WARNING **

Having in the last unexpected scene of 2016's Split created a connection between that film and his Unbreakable film from sixteen years earlier, M Night Shyamalan continues the unlikely series in this third film by having a new character, Dr Ellie Staple, assemble the old characters in a psychiatric ward for sessions of psychoanalysis designed to break the patients' shared delusion that they are superheroes, which, as a plot, raises interesting ideas about human potential, shared experience and the limits people place on themselves, and with the glut of superhero blockbusters in cinemas, this plot provides a welcome spin on a tired genre, but the movie errs in the end when it seems to choose a side but abandons viewers on the other side of the movie's central question: is anything extraordinary happening on the screen?

★★★☆☆

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Split (2016)

I went into this horror thriller about three girls kidnapped by a man with 23 or perhaps 24 distinct personalities confident I had worked out in advance director M Night Shyamalan's trademark twist and I am pleased to say the always fascinating Split is not one of Shyamalan's bad films like Lady In The Water but a good one like Unbreakable in that it delivers a delicious curveball in the end that is as unexpected as it is dismaying (because my ending was less surprising but better and certainly what was intended, I think, before the marketing team's endscene got tacked-on instead).

★★★★☆

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The Visit (2015)

This is a creepy, unpleasant movie about two personality-free kids home-videoing their weeklong visit to their grandparents, an elderly pair who behave increasingly strangely, and most people will see the twist-in-the-end coming in the first ten minutes and will find the handicam videography tiresome.

★★☆☆☆

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The Sixth Sense (1999)

The spooky thriller that momentarily shot director M Night Shyamalan and child star Haley Joel Osment to fame features Toni Collette as the mother of a troubled boy (Osment) who sees dead people, Bruce Willis as the child psychologist trying to help, and a now famous twist in the movie's tail.

★★★★☆

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The Happening (2008)

The Happening is the point most people think M Night Shyamalan's career derailed, but I love its kookiness and deliberate pace, controversially think Mark Wahlberg is good in it, find the idea of airborne threats from plants not so ridiculous, and see in the movie many of the combined elements of comedy and horror I loved so much in Signs.

★★★☆☆

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Lady in the Water (2006)

Awful to the point of being unwatchable is this self-indulgent movie from M Night Shyamalan based on a bedtime story he told his kids, apparently, featuring only completely cracked characters, residents of an apartment complex with a swimming pool that is home to a mermaid-like creature. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Unbreakable (2000)

M Night Shyamalan has made some good movies and some stinkers, and this one with its hypnotic tone, Bruce Willis' gravitas as the sole survivor of a plane crash, and a clever slow shift of the story into an unexpected direction is terrific.

★★★★☆

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Signs (2002)

This movie about a Pennsylvanian family struggling to maintain normalcy as they monitor media reports of a series of strange goings-on across the globe, benefits greatly from having been made by M Night Shyamalan while he was still committed to making good movies, and before its lead, Mel Gibson, embarked on a series of strange goings-on around the world all of his own.

★★★★☆

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