A good twist in a movie leaves just about everyone shocked and needing to watch the movie again to see what they were missing the entire time. M. Night Shyamalan became widely known for this quirk since he started putting it wherever he could, staging a reveal at the end of his movies to show just how much people had missed while trying to keep up with the main idea. Once the twist hits you it almost feels like a gut punch that was being wound up throughout the movie, a tense and unforgiving moment that one couldn’t have seen had they tried. Some folks have claimed that they knew what was coming from the first moment that something felt off, but many of these individuals are either lying or were told in advance by someone that had already seen the movie. But Shyamalan has become quite adept at creating plot twists within his movies that are well done, but at the same time have become so expected that people have watched his most recent movies like hawks trying to locate a mouse in a hayfield.
It can happen obviously, but quite a few audience members simply want to enjoy the movie and be amazed later, which is why the twist becomes such a big part of the movie, to begin with. There are a few twists that took a lot of people by surprise, but there are also a few that made people wonder why Shyamalan even considered it. One answer is that he might have believed that like his other twists, people would have been amazed by what he’d done. The Happening is by far and large one of the twists that people felt let down by, even though the idea of trees releasing a chemical into the winds that would turn humans suicidal was creepy.
Some of the other twists have made people jump quite a bit since the moment in Devil when the old woman stood up, her eyes dark and devoid of iris or pupil, marking her as the devil that had come a-calling. Devil was a rather odd movie but it did serve a point since the five people in the elevator had all done something in their lives that had marked them in some way. But the idea of the devil coming to earth to collect and supposedly taking random souls when it’s likely that many upon many carry the same type of mark on their soul was hard to get around. It wasn’t a horrible story, but the localized feel of it was a bit interesting if one really sat down to think about it. One of Shyamalan’s other stories, Signs, was a little too coincidental for a lot of people since the glasses of water left all over the house, the alien invasion, the crop circles, the bat hanging on the wall in just the right place, and pretty much everything that happened that came together so simply by the end. And like it or not, if a person has an asthma attack that severe, there’s still a way for something as fine as a spray to find its way into a body.
But the suspension of disbelief is a life-saver in a lot of movies, and it’s not such a bad thing to let it go just so long as we don’t go around thinking that what’s shown on the big screen is actually real. But another great movie, and the one that a lot of people were likely wanting to hear about, is The Sixth Sense. This movie inspired so many different memes, jokes, GIFs, and other forms of mockery that it’s usually better to go along with it than to be offended since the idea of the movie was great, the actors were great, and the story was one of the best of its time. But this movie could have been tipped on its ear a little too easily since the tension was running high the entire time, and didn’t really let up until Cole and Malcolm said goodbye to each other. But then as many people know, the tension came rushing back with the force of a runaway truck as it hit and hit hard, slamming into people so hard that many folks watched the movie once again, and then again to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.
Out of all the twists, The Sixth Sense is the one that people talk about the most since it was one of those that the audience really paid attention to. After that, however, folks began to suspect all of Shyamalan’s movies to have a twist, and they haven’t been disappointed so far, at least not with the lack of a twist. Some of the twists though were a bit of a letdown since they stripped away the illusions and left us with little more than empty shells, kind of like The Village.
