灵异第六感 英文观后感

Mary Wang

English Speaking and Writing MA5

Adair

Forma Essay I（Draft 3，April 30th）

Movie Review of The Sixth Sense

―Do you know why you’re afraid when you’re alone?‖ Cole Sear asks Dr. Malcolm Crowe in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 thriller The Sixth Sense.

Bruce Willis stars as Malcolm Crowe, a gifted therapist who specializes in children. The night he receives an award for his work, a former patient, one of his few failure cases, breaks into his house and shoots Crowe and then himself. Months later, Crowe is still very shaken. He feels that he can't communicate with his wife. He is treating just one patient, a boy named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), who reminds him of the patient he failed. Crowe gradually wins Cole's trust, and Cole confides that he sees "dead people‖. At first, Crowe thinks this is a symptom of deep psychological disturbance, but then he comes to believe that the boy really does see the spirits of people who have died and he must find a way to make that experience less terrifying for him.

The final section –in which everything is "explained"– really surprised me. Because I was so connected to the drama by that point. That was thanks to subtle work of the actors. On the surface, it seems that it’s the therapist who has saved the little boy Cole, but it’s a real surprise to know that the therapist is actually a ghost and he is helped by Cole. The boy has solved his two big problems——the guilty feeling to the former patient he gave up and the deep love of his wife.

The movie changes my viewpoint about Willis. Except the code hero in the ―Die Hard‖series, he can also play an ordinary person whose heart overflows with tenderness. When he played with little Cole, he became his father and friend. When they two walked together in

the film, sunlight poured in through the tree branches, it makes audience feel deeply touched. The camerawork is also excellent. A good example is a scene that Crowe tried to get close to little Cole through playing games. Without any special skills, just some simple shot transitions, the result is a crisp scene, just like the dialogue they had at that time. The camerawork and the dialogue are both not as easy as they seem to be.

The Sixth Sense is a thriller. It is low key, has almost no visual effects and relies solely on its deep and complex characters. While there are only one or two scares of the sudden variety, the rest of them are more of the unsettling kind, which induce a cold chill down your back rather than a scream from your mouth. The best example is a scene at the top of a stairwell at a party where Cole can hear someone behind a trapdoor - this sequence is truly unnerving and what happens next, well, it’s hard to take eyes off the screen. The film can scare the audience without going for over-the-top violence.

On the downside, the main problem of the movie is the pace. It drags in parts, especially in the first half. Still, this is an effective and very well-made movie which isn't really a suspense thriller, but rather a slightly disturbing and darn creepy drama that will be remembered for quite some time.