The worst film ever in my opinion

Rating: 1/10 (9 April 2020)

I suppose we should all have an answer when someone asks what the worst/your most hated film is. The Sixth Sense is that film for me. Perhaps it's relevant that I felt more immature than most of my friends who were hooked by it at the time. I actually avoided all spoilers and saw it a year or so later on free-to-air TV when I was about 16. It was marketed as a thriller/horror, but it came across as a boring, depressing drama full of crying to the point that I didn't give it my full attention. I kept the TV on but I stopped caring long before the ending was revealed.
If I'd first seen it as an adult, I might have a slightly different story, but it's too late. The nature of The Sixth Sense means that it only has one chance to be effective and repeat viewings are laughable. When films grow on you and you enjoy little things you didn't discern the first time around, they're the best. So The Sixth Sense truly is the opposite of the best. It's a film where the more you watch it, the more you notice things wrong with it, until that's practically all you can focus on.
It'd be understandable if only bits such as the restaurant scene came across as unnatural. But to me, the most unnatural element is the way Cole's mother treats him. She's surprisingly curt and unmotherlike considering his young age, which only helps to disrupt any suspension of disbelief I had in what I'm seeing. The couple of gross-out/scare moments thrown in are out of place and an insult to horror fans. Such paltry crumbs make me feel that a movie is just scoring marketing points and the real target audience is my wallet or advertising viewership. It's as if they think a sappy drama with a few horror moments resolves to a gritty thriller on average in the audience's mind. I may be mature now, but I still absolutely loathe sappy dramas and these wrongs do a great job of making the film even that much worse.