The Village (2004), with its closed community defined by earnestness of speech and adherence to extinct values, can be read as a response to this dissonance between the director’s work and the culture that had emerged around it.Īnother factor it would be naive to dismiss is racism. This hasn’t been ideal timing for a filmmaker who asks for childlike wonder and rapt attention, who aspires to provoke contemplation and wants his audience to ‘listen like a child and believe in things’. It’s worth noting that Shyamalan’s rise to prominence coincides with the rise of digital media, the decline of attention spans and a general pop-cultural turn towards snark and testosterone-fuelled arrested adolescence. Why is one of the only truly interesting mainstream movie-makers of the Noughties so publicly derided whilst so many mediocrities get a pass? Surrounded by haters
Yet the inane binary by which he is either the flawless genius of his PR campaigns or a talentless charlatan worthy only of internet bullying gets in the way of appreciating the true qualities and singularity of Shyamalan’s work. It’s hard to think of a more polarising recent filmmaker, and as time has passed, the consensus has shifted heavily to the negative side: type his name into YouTube and one of the first videos that pops up is a satirical sketch entitled ‘No One Likes M. His enormous and unforeseen success brought him plenty of fans but was followed in short order by unusually intense hostility from both within the industry and parts of the filmgoing public – a response that seemed to gather momentum in some quarters once the director’s sensitivity to such criticism became known (“it hurts, definitely”). This is, of course, a feature of stories throughout history (especially, as Shyamalan notes in the script, bedtime ones), though often described by detractors as the filmmaker’s ‘one trick’. After this worthy if inauspicious beginning he directed The Sixth Sense, a melancholy melding of horror ( The Exorcist loomed large) and family drama, which introduced his habit of including twists and surprises in his narratives. “I don’t want to watch movies by those people.”Īfter attending Catholic school and making countless Super 8 films, he attended NYU’s film school and made two features – the second of which, Wide Awake (1998), explored questions of mortality and belief from the perspective of a child. “Some people fall into directing,” he has said.
Yet ever since he followed up his 1999 sleeper hit The Sixth Sense with the austere superhero movie Unbreakable (2000), he has been a marked man, a divisive auteur at work within the mainstream, at once enormously successful and on the brink of failure, under constant attack.Īfter Earth is reviewed by Nick Pinkerton in the August 2013 issue of Sight & Sound.īorn in India and raised in and around Philadelphia, the son of Hindu doctors, the young Shyamalan saw Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark as a child and unequivocally set his sights on a directorial career. The film finds Shyamalan hiding in plain sight, burying his idiosyncrasies in atypically characterless work. This isn’t wholly unjustified: it’s his weakest film to date and – perhaps not coincidentally – one over which he has exerted relatively little creative control (it’s based on an idea by its producer and star, Will Smith).
Night Shyamalan’s latest credit as director and (co-)writer, has emerged to predictable sneers about the writer-director’s career arc and frequently bilious invective from on- and offline critics. Once were legends: Jaden Smith in After Earth (2013)Īfter Earth, M.