One of those rare movies that uses the conventions of a tired genre to to express a deeply humanistic vision.

Rating: 10/10 (8 August 1999)

Within one month of each other, 2 watershed movies have opened that have, each in their own way, done more to shake the hoary old genre of horror movies to its foundations than any movies in decades.
One is the Blair Witch Project; the other is The Sixth Sense.
The horror genre has been mired for some time in the baroque self-indulgence of superficial and ornamental special effects. The Blair Witch Project has come along like the cinematic equivalent of punk rock---stripping away the self-indulgence to help rediscover the elemental core of the genre.
The Sixth Sense is quite another matter entirely: it is quite simply a great pop movie----deeply felt, humanistic---and almost certain to be overlooked and underestimated. It is a movie that uses the conventions of the horror genre, but bends them to its own purposes. Like the movie ET, which taught us that not all aliens are unfriendly invaders, and in so doing, liberated the alien/sci fi genre.......so to The Sixth Sense steadfastly refuses to view the spirit world as some adolescent frat-party of frights. Instead, it reacquaints us with the age-old lore that tells us that the dead shall walk the earth as long as their spirits are troubled. The dead do not haunt the earth, and our memories, just to scare us---but because they want something from us, some grace note that gives their lives meaning, and settles old hurts and misunderstandings, but not in the immature and vengeful way that the horror genre had descended into. And we the living want something from the deceased who have left us: we want them to be proud of us, to give us their blessing. And so this movie, incredibly enough for a movie that plays almost straight with the conventions of the horror genre, is a subtle meditation about love and connectedness and relationships, between the living, and between the living and the dead. It is a movie about redemption. And one thing it helps to redeem is the genre that it arises from.