8 Brilliant Movie Plot Twists (That Don't Make Sense At All)
5. Why Doesn't Malcolm Crowe Realise He's Dead Already, Given That He Never Talks To Anybody? - The Sixth Sense
The Plot Twist:The Sixth Sense clings to what is perhaps the most famous twist in movie history - I'm not suggesting that it's the best twist ever, or that it even deserves to be the most famous one, but it probably is. If you say "movie twist," most people think about this movie first. The story concerns a child psychiatrist, Dr. Malcolm Crowe, who is assigned a new patient, Cole Sear, who has the ability to "see dead people." In the end, it turns out that - yes - Dr. Crowe was a ghost all along.
But Wait... At first, this twist seems like a stroke of genius - nobody saw it coming, right? M. Night Shyamalan, you son of a gun! And that's true, until you realise that, although The Sixth Sense is a great movie, it's a horribly manipulative one, too. Think about it: the movie is purposely (and perfectly) designed to only show you only scenes where it looks as if Dr. Crowe is living a normal life. In one scene, for example, we see Crowe sitting opposite Cole's mother at her home in silence. We presume they're just lost for words, when in actuality she can't even see him - coming into this scene a few minutes earlier, though, and we might have realised what was really happening.
Fact is, Shyamalan is just concealing information 'til the end for the added impact. That's fine, but it's an incredibly sneaky way of doing things. That's to say, wouldn't Crowe have realised before he met Cole that he was dead, or that something weird was going on with his new lifestyle? He doesn't talk to anyone. He doesn't have any other patients. He doesn't eat. He doesn't go to bathroom. He just goes to work every day, stands around looking sad, and goes home again. Sure, you might cite the confused "transitional" period between life and death as the reason for all that, but really Shyamalan is just covering his tracks.
The biggest question of all, of course: who hired Crowe in the first place to talk to Cole?