8 "Great" Movies You Actually Only Remember For The Plot Twist
5. The Sixth Sense (1999)
What People Remember About The Movie: "This one's easy: Haley Joel Osment can see ghosts. Bruce Willis is a ghost. What else? Um, well, Haley Joel Osment has a mom and there's a young, scary Mischa Barton. That's it. That's the film."
The Sixth Sense is probably the most famous "movie with a twist" ever made, and it's generally regarded to be a great film - M. Night Shyamalan's best movie, at least, and the one that tricked the world into thinking that we had another Steven Spielberg on our hands. That wasn't the case, obviously, as The Village confirmed that.
To deride The Sixth Sense might seem like cinematic blasphemy, then, but here's a film with a reputation that far exceeds the contents of what's actually in the movie. Not only does the twist itself not make much sense (that's an argument for another time, though), but very little of the movie is as memorable as the final denouement. As a narrative, The Sixth Sense kind of blurs into a hazy collection of scenes.
That's not to say there's nothing to like: there is a level of craftsmanship inherent to Shyamalan's film that is admirable. It's just that, narratively, nothing really stands out about The Sixth Sense and the story beats don't linger. Imagine trying to describe what happens in this film to a friend, beat by beat: it's harder than you think.