8 More Movie Plot Twists So Subtle You Totally Missed Them
4. Cole Knew Malcolm Was A Ghost The Whole Time - The Sixth Sense
The Movie
Destined to be remembered as M. Night Shyamalan's crowning achievement, The Sixth Sense is one of the most fondly-remembered horror films of the last 20 years.
Nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, it's a tightly-wound, often quietly suspenseful film that, of course, is best known for its jaw-dropping final plot twist, that protagonist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) was actually dead the entire time.
The Twist You Didn't Notice
While the climactic rug-pull is spelled out to the audience at the end of the movie with no ambiguity whatsoever, there's another twist hiding in plain sight, one which started out as a fan theory but was later confirmed by Shyamalan to be true.
As it turns out, Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a young boy with the ability to see dead people, knew that Malcolm was dead from the first moment he saw him.
The evidence is as follows. Firstly, Cole is terrified of Malcolm the first time he sees him yet doesn't ask his mother (Toni Collette) who he is, because he knows she can't see him.
Secondly, given that the film makes it clear that Cole sees dead people in whatever their final deathly state was - as with the dead cyclist - it's a pretty fair assumption that he's been spending the entire movie looking at Malcolm with a giant gaping gunshot wound emanating from his stomach.
He even tells Malcolm that the ghosts "see what they want to see", while peering at Malcolm's stomach, and Malcolm obviously sees himself as not-wounded until he makes the climactic revelation.
As for why Cole never just told Malcolm the truth? He never told the other ghosts either, and given the likelihood that they wouldn't react so well, you can hardly blame him.
But again, if all this isn't enough, Shyamalan himself confirmed it in a Q&A a few years ago, so there you have it. You'll never watch the movie the same way again.