Worst to Best: The Films of M. Night Shyamalan

The up-and-down career of a director whose idiosyncrasies set him apart, for better or worse.

Many of M. Night Shyamalan’s worst films—and many of his best—are context-dependent. Where was he when he made The Sixth Sense or Lady in the Water or The Visit? And more to the point, where is he in the work? Did he have the freedom to be his idiosyncratic self or was he trying to revive a career that has hit the rocks on more than one occasion? Preparing this list felt as much like storytelling as criticism, because the confident auteur behind The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs would eventually have to borrow against his house to make a found-footage thriller in order to salvage his reputation. And even in the cases where he could be fully himself, it hasn’t always been a welcome development, as his weaknesses in plotting and dialogue often undercut the uncanny formal beauty of his best work. With Trap currently in theaters and Shyamalan oh-so-tentatively ascendant in Hollywood, it’s a good opportunity to see where he’s been and where he might be going. 

(One note: Shyamalan’s first feature, 1992’s Praying With Anger, is not included on this list. It’s only currently available in a crummy dub on YouTube, and it wouldn’t be fair to assess the work of such a visually ambitious director through muddy images.) 

15. The Last Airbender (2010) 

Only one year after groundbreaking films like Avatar and Coraline suggested a new, perhaps sustainable 3-D boom, The Last Airbender signaled its inevitable demise. It is not necessarily Shyamalan’s fault that Paramount chased after the 3-D upcharge through a crummy conversion job, but there was no more deflating moment in the era than watching the bright, coming-atcha Paramount logo lead into 100 minutes of digital sludge. After bottoming out with Lady in the Water and The Happening, Shyamalan was looking to conquer Hollywood with the first of a planned trilogy about an element-wrangling Chosen One type trying to prevent Fire Nation from throwing the world into chaos. But the true chaos here is in the noisy mix of substandard effects and sub-sub-standard performances, and Shyamalan is lost in it. (That fans of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the beloved animated series the film adapts, revolted probably didn’t help either.)

14. Wide Awake (1998) 

Let’s try this twist on a classic dril tweet: “issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding [the convicted sex monster Harvey Weinstein], you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to him.’” Before Shyamalan broke through with The Sixth Sense, he was tormented by the now-disgraced Miramax chief, who wanted to recut the director’s second film and buried it for three years. Squint a little and you can see Wide Awake as a dry run for the queries into death and spiritual enlightenment that run through The Sixth Sense, following a runty 10-year-old Catholic school student searching for answers after the death of his beloved grandfather. But bereft of any distinctive style or gripping supernatural elements, the film is instead a drippy family comedy that makes little impression. 

13. The Happening (2008)

Conventional wisdom tends to place The Happening at rock bottom for Shyamalan, and there’s absolutely no question that it’s a stinker, an instant so-bad-it’s-good classic. Yet in a career that’s been occasionally bedeviled by trend-hopping or less personal studio work, The Happening is at least an example of Shaymalan failing on his own idiosyncratic terms. The high-concept hook (here it’s plants revolting against humans), the portentous atmosphere, the hushed and unnatural dialogue, the big twists—all are at least present here, anchoring a natural disaster movie that attempts the mass paranoia of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers film. Yet beyond the genuinely eerie opening sequence, when a shift in the wind lead to mass suicide at Central Park and beyond, there’s no end to the laughable moments, anchored to Mark Wahlberg’s stilted lead performance and his eyeing of a lemon drink.