The horror movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “To call it an anticlimax would be an insult to climaxes”
Roger Ebert was a critic whose opinions on movies mattered. The Chicago Sun-Times writer reviewed films for that newspaper for 46 years until he died in 2013 and even won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. As one-half of the Siskel and Ebert duo, he also brought his razor-sharp criticism to television alongside Gene Siskel in a series of shows such as Sneak Previews and At the Movies. Ebert was always a champion for film as an artistic medium, lavishing the movies he loved with praise. Naturally, there was a flipside to that coin, though. When Ebert hated something – such as this anticlimactic horror movie – he truly eviscerated it.
In 1999, The Sixth Sense became a cultural phenomenon that catapulted its young director, M Night Shyamalan, into the Hollywood stratosphere. The $40million supernatural mystery drama came out of left field and stunned audiences with its spooky atmosphere, stunning performances, and head-spinning twist ending. Amazingly, in a year that included blockbusters like The Mummy, Toy Story 2, and The Matrix, it became the second highest-grossing film in cinemas – behind only Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace.
Ebert wasn’t quite as bowled over by The Sixth Sense as the rest of the world, although he did think it was a very good film. In his three-star review – out of four – he wrote, “The Sixth Sense has a kind of calm, sneaky self-confidence that allows it to take us down a strange path, intriguingly.” He admitted he didn’t see the now iconic twist coming and gave Shyamalan credit for the fact that the clues were all right there in plain sight. He noted: “The movie hasn’t cheated, but the very boldness of the storytelling carried me right past the crucial hints and right through to the end of the film, where everything takes on an intriguing new dimension.”
Ebert’s admiration for Shyamalan grew over the course of his next two films. He gave Unbreakable another three-star review, believing it was just as “quietly intriguing” as The Sixth Sense. He credited the young director – who was being compared to Steven Spielberg at the time – with trusting his audience to pay attention to the minutiae of his plots, which is something many more experienced filmmakers struggle with.
By the time Ebert got to Signs, though, he had become a card-carrying Shyamalan fan. Awarding the film a full four stars, he gushed, “Signs is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has been decided but how much has been experienced.” He praised the director for making quiet, suspenseful films in an age where all-out action was the order of the day and even compared him to Alfred Hitchcock in his ability to play “the audience like a piano.”
Unfortunately for Shyamalan, his next film brought Ebert back down to Earth. In a scathing one-star review, Ebert dismissed The Village—a story about a rural 19th-century community living in fear of the mysterious creatures in its surrounding woods—as a “colossal miscalculation”.
Perhaps Ebert was too hyped up for The Village because he’d become a genuine admirer of Shyamalan. Maybe he thought the filmmaker had overplayed his hand by returning to the same well once too often, this time with a considerably less bulletproof central conceit. Or perhaps he found the twist ending so ridiculous that it torpedoed the rest of the film instead of shining a new light on the intricacies of the plot and characters, as the twists in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable had done.
Whatever the case, Ebert hated The Village with a passion reserved for comparatively few films. He wrote that Shyamalan is “a director of considerable skill who evokes stories out of moods, but this time, alas, he took the day off.” Most of his ire was reserved for the twist, though, which Ebert felt was laughable. He wrote, “To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from ‘It was all a dream.'”
Hilariously, the esteemed critic added that the twist annoyed him so thoroughly that he wanted to rewind the film – and his own consciousness – to a point where he didn’t know the disappointing truth. Ouch.
