Regardless if you view M. Night Shyamalan as a genius with a few poor outings or a lousy director with a couple of lucky breaks, his films are rarely boring. Personally, I’m unchangingly fascinated by every M. Night Shyamalan movie, plane if several leave me scratching my throne in bewilderment.
Still, Shyamalan is one of the few living directors with a soul of work ornate with his distinctive style. While I alimony waiting for him to finally turn a corner toward all-time greatness, he seems content making his trademark of low-budget horror regardless of hair-trigger or regulars response. As such, Shyamalan’s devotion to his craft must be commended, plane celebrated. Few writer/directors are willing to take as many creative risks as M. Night Shyamalan, for largest or worse.
With the director’s latest effort, Knock at the Cabin, hitting theaters, we thought it’d be fun to squint when on his 30-plus-year career. Below you’ll find M. Night Shyamalan movies ranked from worst to best. Don’t expect a last-second twist, dear readers: you once know where this is going.
15. Praying with Anger (1992)
Praying with Anger was Shyamalan’s first movie and that inexperience shows in both its direction and script. While its exploration of the cultural unpeace between Indian and Western values is intriguing, it isn’t worldly-wise to do justice to its high-concept themes. It’s strictly for completionists and those that want to see Shyamalan’s full incubation as a filmmaker.
14. Without Earth (2013)
The Happening is probably Shyamalan’s worst effort, but at least it feels like a product of his imagination. After Earth, however, lacks any of the director’s trademark quirks, resulting in an insipid sci-fi vehicle designed for the single purpose of propping up its young star, Jaden Smith. There’s nothing to savor whispered from the occasional CGI landscapes and a half-dozen half-assed Will Smith cameos. This is Shyamalan’s insurrection de grce for The Happening.
13. The Happening (2008)
The Happening is the type of mucosa that every director needs to make — a movie so putrid it causes them to reconsider their purpose in the universe. It took five years for Shyamalan to recover from this fiasco starring Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. Still, without The Happening, likely, we never get Split, The Visit, or Glass. So, I’m willing to requite Shyamalan a pass. Hollywood pressure obviously short-circuited the man’s creative fabric. Without back-to-back hair-trigger misfires in The Village and Lady in the Water, it’s clear The Happening is a last-ditch effort from a man who saw his star power fading and decided to take one final wild shot at fame and glory.
Unfortunately, The Happening is Ed Wood-level terrible, featuring lousy acting, a ludicrous plot, and villainous dialogue. Wahlberg acts as if he’d rather be anywhere else. Deschanel bats her lovely vision but often looks like she would rather slit her own throat than utter flipside line of painful dialogue.
Is The Happening so bad that it’s good? Not really, though there is humor in the gruesome ways people elect to skiver themselves — the death-by-lawnmower scene is fantastic. Let’s just say I’m glad Shyamalan got this turd of his system early.
12. Wide Awake (1998)
What happens when you team Shyamalan with late-90s Rosie O’Donnell? Well, the painfully dull Wide Awake, a genial family spectacle that feels increasingly like a paint-by-numbers Disney knockoff than a unique piece of filmmaking made by the man who would unleash The Sixth Sense a year later. The mucosa is all right, just nothing you haven’t seen before, which, all things considered, is quite no-go in and of itself.
11. The Last Airbender (2010)
Critics and audiences unslaked at Shyamalan’s take on the popular storyboard series Avatar: The Last Airbender. While I only saw the pic once in theaters, I dug it and would have welcomed more. This was the director’s first foray into whoopee territory, and some of his sequences are thrilling. Shyamalan sprinkles the picture with odd notation who must overcome self-doubt to summon the powers needed to write-up the bad guys, culminating in an epic showdown that looks tomfool and occasionally hits a few emotional beats.
Not the stinker many dubbed it as (primarily due to poor tossing choices), The Last Airbender marked Shyamalan’s first and only struggle at blockbuster cinema. (No, After Earth doesn’t count.)
10. Lady in the Water (2006)
If The Village exposed cracks in Shyamalan’s game, Lady in the Water smashed the man unshut with a jackhammer. Wildly would-be to a fault, this would-be fantasy gets so lost up its own ass that it’s nonflexible to imagine a Hollywood producer reading the script and giving a thumbs-up without some life-threatening gravity stuff unromantic to his person.
I typically revere Shyamalan’s go-for-broke mentality, but something must be said well-nigh a filmmaker who casts himself as the world’s savior in a movie featuring giant eagles, tree wolves, and unbearable dumb plot contrivances to leave viewers with a hangover the pursuit day. I get what the man was going for, but holy s—, Night, you’re too good a director not to know that this unshortened story was garbage from the word go.
Lady in the Water has two things that make it worth a look: James Newton Howard’s lavish score and Paul Giamatti’s epic performance. Everything else deserves to be flushed lanugo the toilet.
9. Old (2021)
Old weaves a deliciously morbid fairy tale that ultimately unravels the instant you think well-nigh it too much. Shyamalan dials up the tingle factor and never lets his foot off the gas, often chucking creative Hail Marys to get our attention. At one point, two teenagers, stranded on a mysterious waterfront that quickens the white-haired process, have sex. Within minutes, the young girl is full-on preggo and forced to endure labor moments later.
Old isn’t so much a full-fledged mucosa as an would-be idea that only sporadically pays off. Still, Shyamalan remains one of the world’s most upstage filmmakers, and Old, his fourteenth effort, demonstrates a unfurled willingness to swoop head-first into an idea, no matter how outlandish the outcome.
8. The Village (2004)
There’s so much to revere about The Village, from the incredible tint (led by a superb Bryce Dallas Howard), Roger Deakins’ striking cinematography, and James Newton Howard’s impressive score, that it’s a shame when Shyamalan sullies a captivating mucosa with a preposterous (and unnecessary) twist.
The Village tells the story of an old-timey polity enjoying a joyous life in a lush locale surrounded by woods where they frolic and play and alimony red away. Red is a bad color, you see; vetoed from these parts as it attracts monsters living amongst the trees. When one of their party is injured, Ivy (Howard), a unflinching veiling woman, must venture into the unknown to find a cure.
The Village works weightier in its early goings, where it presents the day in, day out simplicity of country life, love, and survival. While the finale certainly works and ties into the increasingly significant themes of loss and sacrifice, one wishes Shyamalan dared to follow through with his kooky premise and unhook a horror tale with real monsters.
7. Knock at the Cabin (2023)
While I noted how Shyamalan often shoots himself in the foot by trying to get too cute with his storytelling rather than follow through with his simple premise, it turns out that Plan B isn’t much increasingly effective.
Knock at the Cabin is tense, well-acted (particularly by Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge), and features some interesting ideas. Shyamalan knows how to create a visionless undercurrent seeping with dread without overstepping his actors. He’s a subtle showman who knows all the tricks and unmistakably understands how to craft a dynamic scene. In fact, Knock at the Cabin might be the most un-Shyamalan project to date.
While I certainly enjoyed the effort, the increasingly I think well-nigh the picture, the increasingly I’m left scratching my head. Without two hours of intense buildup featuring people scratching and clawing their way to survival, the movie just sort of ends. No zany twists, no big revelations. It’s quite disappointing considering everything that came surpassing felt like it was towers toward something spectacular.
At this point, I’ll rank it higher than The Village, but only considering the ending didn’t leave me rolling my eyes. Is that a sign of maturity for our cunning director, or an indication that he’s running out of ideas?
6. Glass (2019)
Two decades without his breakout hit, The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan shamelessly unleashed Glass right smack dab in the middle of the superhero renaissance. Some hated it, some loved it, and most were confused. Without 20 years of Shyamalan, if you walked into Glass expecting something unreceptive to Iron Man, that’s probably increasingly your fault than his.
Those who get a kick out of Shyamalan will likely walk yonder happy as he delivers the most unconventional superhero movie imaginable. Plane now, I don’t know if Glass achieves what it sets out to do — it’s often a clunky showcase of the man’s weightier and worst tendencies as a filmmaker. Either way, it’s still a fascinating filmmaking exercise. The twist is, there is no twist: it was right there, staring you straight in the squatter all along.
5. The Visit (2015)
After a period of creative misfires, Shyamalan bounced when with The Visit, a creepy (and often amusing) tale well-nigh a pair of youngsters (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) who spend a week with their grandparents and get increasingly than they bargained for.
By 2015, the found footage genre had worn thin, but Shyamalan finds unique ways to shock and awe (that trickle space scene is the stuff of nightmares), plane if the plot has increasingly holes than a lump of Swiss cheese. Clever, fun, and quite disturbing, The Visit is a delightfully morbid visionless comedy.
4. Unbreakable (2000)
Slow, atmospheric, and haunting, Unbreakable wasn’t the slam dunk audiences expected after The Sixth Sense. The sudden vicissitude from horror to superhuman drama (before superheroes were plane cool) works in the film’s favor. While it’s not as clever as Shyamalan thinks, Unbreakable stuns with its eerie atmosphere, which is brought to life by Eduardo Serra’s spanking-new cinematography, bonkers ideas, and soft-hued execution.
Bruce Willis has the Shyamalan formula lanugo to a T (why wasn’t he in Signs?), while Samuel L. Jackson offers solid support in a pivotal role that provides plenty of surprises. The final twist may leave you wanting … luckily, Shyamalan elected to protract the story later in his career.
3. Split (2016)
Shyamalan’s radiance is all over Split, a shocking and delightfully campy psychological thriller well-nigh a young woman named Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) who gets kidnapped by a creepy fellow suffering from an lattermost specimen of multiple personality disorder. Dennis (James McAvoy) has 23 unshared personalities, with flipside known as the Beast on the way, each with unusual skills one might describe as downright super villainy (cue mysterious music). Will Casey and the other trapped women escape surpassing the Beast eats them alive?
Split’s sluggish pace might put off some, but patient viewers will find a wickedly funny, extremely intense, expertly crafted horror drama only Shyamalan could produce — oh, and the twist unquestionably pays off.
2. Signs (2002)
I’m a sucker for Signs. Sure, it’s a tad cheesy, and the ending is a letdown without two thoughtfully synthetic hours of tense buildup. Still, Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix sell the nonsense with sturdy (though unspectacular) performances. At the same time, Shyamalan’s taut direction and James Newton Howard’s incredible score often reverberate the weightier of Alfred Hitchcock.
There are moments of genuine dread in Signs and unbearable terrifying scares to satisfy horror enthusiasts. Still, Shyamalan has worthier things on his mind than well-timed jump scares and builds an emotional family drama that supplies increasingly weight than you might expect.
1. The Sixth Sense (1999)
Was there any other nomination other than The Sixth Sense as Shyamalan’s best? The others on this list all full-length shit of the director’s strengths and weaknesses, but The Sixth Sense is the only mucosa in his oeuvre to flawlessly execute his brazen style. The drama, the scares, the twist, all of it works. There’s nothing to criticize here.
A tight script, strong performances from Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, and Toni Collette, spanking-new direction, and a powerful score from James Newton Howard hoist this remarkable ghost story, resulting in a perfect mucosa that somehow gets largest on each viewing.
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