solid suspense film

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 1999)

The concept of people who are able to see the dead has served as the foundation for any number of suspense films in the past, including the greatest horror film of all time, 1962's "Carnival of Souls." Now comes the most commercially successful of such films, "The Sixth Sense," which, although it does not begin to approach the quality of that earlier film, still emerges as a solid supernatural thriller that eschews graphic violence and gratuituous gore for understatement and thought-provoking creativity.
Bruce Willis stars as a renowned child psychologist who has just been awarded a major honor by the city of Philadelphia where he works and lives. On the same night, however, a former child patient breaks into his house and shoots Willis while his terrified wife looks helplessly on. Cut to a year later as a recovered Willis pursues his latest patient - a troubled child who harbors a terrifying secret: he is, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone, able to catch fleeting glimpses of dead people, whom the little boy argues, are not aware they are dead. As Willis begins to slowly learn to believe the child, a warm relationship of mutual trust and bonding develops.
It is this concentration on character rather than the more customary grue and gore that separates this film from so many other horror films of recent vintage. Also, the director manages to create and sustain an atmosphere of slightly off-kilter otherworldliness through the use of visual correlatives: the eternally grey October sky, shots of creepy statuary or gloomy buildings caught at odd angles, a lyrical use of shadows, leaves blowing forlornly along an empty, windswept street, a glancing glimpse of a graveyard as it momentarily catches a frightened child's sight as he races by on a city bus. It is these moments, taken as a tapestried whole, that give the film its cumulative suspenseful power.
As to the film's widely heralded surprise twist ending, it will come as less of a revelation to those with a knowledge of such films as "Carnival of Souls," "Jacob's Ladder" and "Ghost" from which "The Sixth Sense" seems to derive much inspiration. Still, the audience does leave the film feeling that it has, at least, been in the hands of a group of filmmakers who respect its intelligence and have carefully thought out the elements of the narrative before rushing the production before the cameras. In this day and age, that is a rare treat indeed.