One of the best horror films of all time, and an allegory of alienation

Rating: 10/10 (28 January 2000)

Last week, when I left the theater after watching this film, I had the strange impression that I had just watched something great. Today, one week later, I'm still convinced that I was right.
When the Horror genre seemed to be poured out into mediocrity with films such as Blair Witch Project or The Haunting, a new one has just appeared which with no doubt deserves one of the highest places at the all-time horror movies top list.
Nowadays it's very difficult to surprise people with a horror movie, or simply to scare people. Everything seems to have been said and done yet. But The Sixth Sense really does both things, so we wonder, where is the secret of The Sixth Sense, if there is any? To find it out we can start by analyzing some of its aspects. Firstly, Bruce Willis does one of the best performances in his whole career (if not the best); Secondly Haley Joel Osment does an Oscar-deserving performance as the boy Cole; thirdly, the secondary actors are close to perfection; fourthly, the screenplay is one of the most imaginative ones we have seen since lots of years ago, with the best ending I could ever have imagined; and finally the music and the sound effects are really impressive, raising the stressing moments to the highest level.
Until now, what we have seen is plenty of good points, excellence in all the film details, but not the real secret. The real secret is (and only can be) something present in every aspect of the movie and at the same time independent from each other. What I mean is the DIRECTING. I certainly could write a thousand lines about the directing of this movie, about its structure, about its developing, about the visuals, about the ideas we could extract, but the only thing I will say about it is: Stanley Kubrick is born again! Shymalan has just become a new star in the movie sky, a new director and writer to add to my all-time top ten list. In fact, when I went to see The Matrix, what I expected and didn't get was something like this, and now I'm so glad that Cinema has finally given it to me. Thank you very much, Mr. Shymalan.
This film can also be viewed from another perspective: it also shows how some people are not able to see that they are emotionally dead. There's a lot of people in the USA and also in other countries who only see what they want to see, just like in the song Nowhere Man, by The Beatles. The psychiatrist was trying to cure the boy, and he didn't realize that it was *his* problem. Sigmund Freud suffered that kind of problem, and now his teachings are extended all over the USA and other countries like France and Argentina.