Tell me a story about why you're sad.

#11 of 31 days of Halloween

The Sixth Sense is tragedy masquerading as horror. It's the disconnection of loss and heartbreak refracted through a ghost story. It's everything a story about specters can and should be.

What allows Shyamalan's pitch perfect masterpiece to hold up upon repeat viewings, long after the twist has been revealed and enshrined in our cultural imagination, is how he uses it to inform the emotional content of what precedes the reveal. Nominally, this is a film about, literally, a dead man walking. A ghost who doesn't know he's a ghost. But, scratching just past the surface, The Sixth Sense explores the ways this lack of self-awareness affects Dr. Malcolm's ability to connect with the people around him.

Sadness saturates every frame of Shyamalan's best picture. Malcolm drifts from scene to scene with the exhaustion of a man who's (ironically) given up on a life he no longer has. He's lonely, his wife no longer speaks to him, and the one opportunity for redemption he has - a little boy who recalls a failed case years prior; a case that came back to haunt him in some devastatingly literal ways - continually slips from his grasp.

Ghosts in The Sixth Sense aren't there to instill fear. They exist to remind us of lost connections, past sins, and unresolved conflicts. They haunt our consciences as much as they haunt our homes. It's in this delicate and brilliant balance that Shyamalan finds an utterly spellbinding emotional strain to plumb.

The Sixth Sense is an unmitigated masterclass in filmmaking. Its storytelling is exact but never cold. Its imagery evocative but never fantastical. Its score melancholic but never overpowering. The Sixth Sense remains a 5/5 and one of my favorite films of all time.