Ranking the 10 greatest M. Night Shyamalan twists
Having built a cemented and recognisable career in filmmaking since his 1992 debut, M. Night Shyamalan is a director and writer heavily trademarked by the plot twist. The Oscar-nominated director is notorious for throwing out an extraordinary piece of plot information that changes everything his audiences understand or respond to what they have just watched.
The director’s classic genres range from psychological thriller to horror, with occasional sci-fi and superhero tones to provide variation. Shyamalan’s works have built a reputation for their chilling and intriguing exposition, beautiful performances and distinguishable stories.
A good twist has to be plausible in its physicality and execution while maintaining surprise and foreshadowing to generate active rewatches. The director conjures up a shocking twist that fits this criterion, planting clues throughout the narrative that lead to the sudden reveal. However, sometimes everything falls too flat and becomes forgettable, whether the film in its entirety or the disappointing twist.
With this in mind, here are the top ten Shyamalan movie twists ranked from worst to best, including chilling supernaturals, underrated period pieces and financial losses.
Ranking M. Night Shyamalan’s movie twists:
10. The Happening (2008)
Shyamalan’s eighth film is a forgotten thriller that stars Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. Its weak narrative charts an unidentifiable natural disaster that leaves a series of mass and global suicides.
The Happening is a painfully poor film, throwing out graphic depictions of people taking their lives in an attempt to shock its views. Moreover, its ‘twist’ isn’t necessarily a plot switch-up or reveal worthy of the title, as it’s more of a story cop-out to end things. The trio, composed of Wahlberg, Deschanel and Leguizamo, accept their grizzly fate and embrace in a yard of plants that are responsible for the epidemic, only to realise they are unharmed by the toxin. For plot convenience, the outbreak has abated as quickly as it began, in the States at least.
9. Old (2022)
The director’s 14th film is adapted from the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters. Old revolves around a group of people ageing rapidly on a secluded beach and stars the likes of Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps.
Old is better than The Happening but is still far from Shyamalan’s best, offering solid performances against a creative enough idea that needs the best execution to work. The film’s big reveal is that the resort is actually part of a pharmaceutical company research team conducting new medical drug trials given to guests with medical conditions.
The beach naturally accelerates the guests’ lives, so the researchers have completed the lifelong drug trials within a day as a cost and time-saving. It’s a hollow inspection of medical ethics as the guests were unaware they were being administered drugs and executed through a bizarre idea of a beach where you physically accelerate in age.
8. Lady in the Water (2006)
Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard star in Shymalam’s seventh film about an apartment complex superintendent discovering a young woman in the swimming pool. He later discovers she is a water nymph threatened by a wolf-life monster.
Lady in the Water is by far one of the director’s weakest works, treading through a dull presentation of what could be an intriguing plot that blends fantasy with the modern world. Its twist offers sparks of thoughtful hybridity as audiences learn the nymph escaped from a fantasy world created by an author (played by Shyamalan). The pair track him down and ask him to write a better future for her world. It’s a potential exploration of meta-fiction and experimentation with story worlds and audience engagement. However, the overall feature pulls everything down.
7. Signs (2002)
The director’s fifth film is a compelling yet underrated sci-fi mixed with a brooding family drama. It features a brilliant cast, including Mel Gibson. The story centres on a former Episcopal priest struggling to hold his family together after the death of his wife, who discovers a series of crop circles in his cornfield and says that the phenomenon results from extraterrestrial life.
Signs swiftly harmonises its sci-fi and family tragedy elements, borrowing emotional fractures between its chilling sequences. However, its twist comes with many holes, such as how sinister and unsettling aliens are fatally allergic to water, yet they chose to invade a planet that is 71% water. However, you could read the twist being that maybe “intelligent” life isn’t out there.
6. Glass (2019)
Glass is a crossover and sequel to the director’s previous films – Unbreakable and Split – and the third and final instalment in the Unbreakable trilogy, focusing on David Dunn trying to stay one step ahead of the law while delivering vigilante justice on the streets of Philadelphia. His extraordinary talents soon put him on a collision course with the Beast – the psychotic madman with superhuman strength and 23 distinct personalities.
Glass may be the weakest of the trilogy storywise, but the performances carry everything through. The film ends with three superpowered men dead and footage proving the existence of superhumans deleted. The twist reveals that Jackson’s murderous Mr Glass, despite being fatally wounded by Beast, still comes out on top. He’s arranged for footage of their battle to be distributed around the world, thus informing humanity that superpowered beings are among them. The ending is a punch of a cliffhanger that lets the antagonist win.
5. Split (2016)
James McAvoy stars in this psychological thriller as a man called Kevin with dissociative identity disorder who kidnaps and imprisons three teenage girls in an isolated underground facility.
Split may have been controversial due to its subject matter of someone with a mental illness being a criminal, but its brilliant performances and unexpected twist distract from any negativity. After Kevin’s other personalities have killed off the two girls, the police rescue Casey, the only surviving victim. In the next frame, the news is played on the television, where the presenter refers to Kevin as The Horde.
The report also chronicles the details of his killing spree, and the name Mr Glass is mentioned, meaning Split is part of the Unbreakable universe. This twist shocked viewers due to being unexpected by still making sense.
4. Unbreakable (2000)
This superhero thriller presents a man who survives a train crash without threatening injuries and realises he harbours superhuman abilities. He comes to the attention of disabled comic book store owner Elijah Price, who manipulates David (played by Bruce Willis) to understand him.
Unbreakable is one of the director’s most acclaimed films, with Quentin Tarantino listing it as one of his top 20 films released since 1992. Its shocking twist reveals a true character and motive as audiences are informed that Willis’s mentor, Price, intentionally caused the fatal train crash to show Dunn’s powers and discover his unbreakable counterpart. The twist signals moral bankruptcy from a character we’ve been aligned with for the plot as a guidance figure, triggering re-watches with this new information.
3. The Visit (2015)
This psychological film focuses on two siblings who go to stay with grandparents they’ve never met as they are estranged from their single mother. They soon notice distressing and bizarre behaviour as the grandparents delve into a series of weird antics.
This film is unnerving from when the children make it to the grandparents’ home, and things accelerate in bizarre and disturbing undertones. In a brilliantly executed twist, the children are told by their confused mother that the grandparents they’ve been staying with aren’t their real grandparents after she sees them on a video call. They are two escaped patients from the psychiatric ward their real grandparents worked at who they murdered and inhabited the identity of. This twist explains the unsettling behaviour realistically and terrifyingly. It’s a spine-chilling reveal that kicks into a fear we all have that you’ve been staying with dangerous strangers.
2. The Village (2004)
The Village is the director’s sixth feature and is a beautiful period thriller about a village’s population who live in fear of creatures inhabiting the woods beyond it. However, after her fiancé is fatally injured, one young woman braves the outside and creatures to find the supplies to save him.
This painfully underrated yet gorgeous film was mismarketed as a straight creature horror rather than rightfully as an insightful exploration of civilisation blended with an innocent romance. Ivy is shocked to learn her father, one of the village’s leading elders, fabricated the creatures with other elders who don the costumes to keep the civilians away from the woods. Why must they stay away from the woods? Because the real modern world is on the other end and will jeopardise the 19th-century illusion that has been fabricated to keep a new generation away from contemporary societal ills. Two brilliant twists elevate this powerful and artistic classic.
1. The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Sixth Sense is a psychological thriller that sees a child psychiatrist recovering from a fatal shooting. He soon learns that his newest patient, played by Haley Joel Osment, can speak to the dead who come to him for help.
The Sixth Sense resides in American film as the ultimate twist as towards the end comes the harrowing reveal that Willis was dead the whole time, having not survived the shooting in the beginning. This infamous twist explains why his wife is so distant and emotional and the child patient’s unnerved nature in his presence. According to Cheat Sheet, Willis revealed in a documentary for the film: “I agreed to do it very quickly. I was as surprised by the ending in the script, I think, as the audience was in the theatre. I was completely unprepared for that ending.”
He added: “Once I knew the ending of the film and that my character was indeed dead, I had to forget about it and act as if I weren’t. I never really thought about acting as a ghost.” Overall, The Sixth Sense is a contemporary horror/thriller classic that elevates its intriguing story material with attentive and thorough execution and magnetic performances, making the brilliant twist all the more entertaining and timeless.
