Split Is The Most Important Film Of M. Night Shyamalan’s Career

With the first public screenings of his new thriller “Trap” happening this evening, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan is once again at the forefront of our minds. Since he broke out in 1999, he’s never really left our thoughts; Shyamalan is one of the most interesting directors working in Hollywood today, a guy with fascinations and quirks and proclivities and passions that permeate his films and make them feel singular, even when they’re bad.

The story of his rise (“The Sixth Sense”), fall (we can quibble when exactly this started, but for sure by the time “Lady in the Water” came out), and cinematic resurrection (starting with “The Visit”), in both the zeitgeist and at the box office, is arguably as compelling as anything the auteur has ever committed to the screen. On today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, some of the site’s editors created a group list of the Top 5 M. Night Shyamalan movies, and during that discussion (which you can hear below), we nearly included 2015’s low-budget horror thriller “The Visit” in our five before ultimately deciding against it. But we touched on something about Shyamalan’s filmography: “The Visit” may have been the movie that started his comeback, but arguably the most important film of his entire career was the one he made right after that.

“The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable,” “Signs,” and “The Village” is an amazing four-movie run. (I know “The Village” has its haters, but we are not among them here.) Unfortunately, “Lady in the Water,” “The Happening,” “The Last Airbender,” and “After Earth” is an equally impressive run … only in the opposite direction in terms of quality. So 2015’s “The Visit” was crucial in showing that Shyamalan hadn’t completely lost his touch, similar to how Tim Burton pulled his own career out of a creative nosedive with the underrated “Big Eyes” the year before. But while Burton still hasn’t fully rediscovered his fastball, the same can’t be said for Shyamalan. 

After being burned so many times in a row, audiences needed assurances that “The Visit” wasn’t a one-off fluke. Thankfully, they got it the following year when Shyamalan released “Split,” a tightly wound thriller with a near-legendary performance by James McAvoy playing a character with nearly two dozen distinct identities inside him. The movie cast off the found-footage conceit of “The Visit” and got back to Night’s old-school Hollywood filmmaking, letting him get back to creating awe with his camerawork and putting us on edge with his classical sense of suspense. Plus, it can’t be overstated how much of a jolt audiences felt when they realized the movie was actually a sneaky sequel to “Unbreakable” when Bruce Willis’s character shows up at the very end. For seven years, until “Five Nights at Freddy’s” came along, “Split” was Blumhouse’s highest-grossing film.

Check out our full Shyamalan conversation on the podcast:

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