Top Psychological Thriller; When the analyzer becomes the analyzed

Rating: 9/10 (14 October 2003)

M. Night Shyamaina's "The Sixth Sense" has come a long way since movies about psychological issues hit the big screen back in 1945 with Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" and shows how much we learned about the subject since then.
Dr. Malcolm Crowe, Bruce Willis, is on top of the world a success in his chosen profession, child psychology, and married to a beautiful and caring wife Anna, Olivia Williams. At the beginning of the film Dr. and Mrs. Crowe down in the living room drinking themselves almost drunk with wine. Celebrating Dr. Crowe being awarded the Mayor's Citation for Professional Excellence Award from the city of Philadelphia. Going up the stairs to the bedroom Dr. Crowe sees that the window is broken and there's someone in the house. When he looks towards the bathroom Dr. Crowe sees that the light is turned on and there's someone in there.
Dr. Crowe trying to get the intruder who's very emotionally disturbed at ease by talking to him finds out that he was one of his patients that he treated who went wrong Vincent Gray, Donnie Wahlberg. Before Dr. Crowe can go any further Vincent pulls out a gun and shoots him point blank and then turns the gun on himself.
The movie then jumps some six months later when Dr. Crowe recovered and back on the job is assigned to his first patient since being shot. He's to treat a six year-old boy Cole Sear, Haley Joel Osment, who's having problems at school and at home. Cole can't get along not only with his classmates and his teachers but also with his single parent mother Lynn Sear, Toni Collette. Cole withdrawn and quite and he gets scared and frightened for apparently no reason when he's looking at seemingly harmless people and places or at nothing at all.
Dr. Crowe starts to talk to Cole as he tries to analyze him and to the Dr.'s surprise little Cole seems to come out of his shell. Cole not only responds to him in an unafraid manner to which he doesn't do to any of his classmates and teachers, whom he knows a lot more the Dr. Crowe, he also also confides in him to what his fears are.
Young Cole has hallucinations that, as he tells a very interested and concerned Dr. Crowe, he "sees dead people". He sees them everywhere, in school, in the streets even at home. He sees them everywhere he looks and there are some that don't even know that there dead. Dr. Crowe at first feels that he's getting through to young Cole and puts all of his attention and efforts to curing him of his psychosis. What he doesn't realize is that the attention that he's paying to Cole is jeopardizing his whole life by neglecting his wife and his friends. As well any other cases of child psychological disorders that he may have to examine and cure in the future.
You begin to wonder why Dr. Crowe is paying so much attention to Cole? Is it that Cole reminds him of Vincent Gray whom he failed so many years ago which ended with him being shot and Vincent killing himself. Is Dr. Crowe afraid that young Cole if not cured will end up the same way? Did that terrible incident at the beginning of the movie damage Dr. Crowe so severely that it completely wrecked his ability as a child psychologist to do his work and made him need psychological help himself?
What really surprised me about "The Sixth Sense" was the quality of Bruce Willis acting in the movie even more then the already legendary, although it's been only four years since the film was released back in 1999, surprise ending. Bruce Willis carried the movie with an academy award caliber performance without a shoot-out explosion or car chase or almost any action at all which Bruce Willis movies are noted for. Willis played the exact opposite a role that he would usually play and excelled in it.
You also have to give top acting credit to the young Haley Joel Osment who played the young boy Cole Sear who held his own and sometime even eclipsed Willis in every scene that they were in together. If "The Sixth Sense" showed anything besides being a top psychological thriller is that when Bruce Willis is too old and unconvincing to play action hero parts he'll still have a very bright future in films that would only require acting.