So, here we are. As promised, I’m here to offer a counterpoint to, well, myself in the case of M. Night Shyamalan, who serves as executive producer and one of the handful of directors on Fox’s Wayward Pines. Even so, the look of Wayward Pines is all Shyamalan, much like David Fincher’s stylistic signature has remained on House of Cards despite him having directed only a few episodes. Shyamalan’s ability to evince an eerie atmosphere through patience and a deep respect for quiet remains clear even today, when he’s not dealing with wind-harnessing wizards or whatever the hell that thing at the end of After Earth was supposed to be. He’s also refined a shaggy, intermittently insightful perspective on the relationship between parents and children, something that felt far more convincing early on into his career. That being said, that visual evocation of intimacy, and that unsteady familial or communal camaraderie, can be gleaned in his newer films as well, even as the impact of his style has been diluted and dulled as his career has gone on.

'The Sixth Sense'

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Image via Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

What in the name of Buddy Holly’s glasses were we thinking? The revelation that Bruce Willis was a ghost the whole time blew back a few hundred thousand wigs when The Sixth Sense hit theaters, but today, the feeling is different. In fact, the big twist that made all other twists feel overworked or just plain inept is the cheapest feeling moment in a film that, otherwise, feels remarkably rich in subtext, emotionally perceptive, and eerie as all hell. The story of a young boy who can talk to ghosts, and the ghost psychiatrist who helps him, is also an expressive reflection of alienation and fear of abandonment, but it’s secret weapon is the relationship between Haley Joel Osment’s haunted loner and his mother, played by the reliably endearing Toni Collette. The scene when he speaks to her about talking to his grandmother is an oddly moving yet distinctly realistic portrait of a parent who is at her emotional limit and is unsure of how to parent a…let’s call it gifted child. Most impressive is the fluid storytelling and percussive editing of the images that Shyamalan built into a brooding chiller, turning a would-be B-movie into an atmospheric, supernaturally tinged study of loss and melancholy.

The “This is Art” Scene from 'Unbreakable'

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Image via Touchstone

Here’s where Shyamalan got straight up prophetic. Not all that long into Unbreakable, his still quite excellent follow-up to The Sixth Sense, Samuel L. Jackson’s Mr. Glass has an encounter with a customer that’s borderline surreal. The customer is looking to purchase original artwork from a popular comic book series for his very young child, and Mr. Glass refuses him before accusing him of disrespecting what is, in Glass’s mind, art. Those who have seen the movie know how Glass’s very serious take on comic book mythology and storytelling corrupts his mind and causes him to kill thousands, and the director makes it clear that to take art seriously is noble but to demand others do as well is a sign of psychosis or mere self-obsession. In a time when people are rightfully rolling their eyes over the overtly grim view of superheroes in DC films, including Zack Snyder’s upcoming Costumed Rich Guy vs. Immortal Flying Alien God: Dawn of Justice, Shyamalan’s criticism of art as rhetoric is spot-on and makes the fact that, somehow, no one has been able to get an Unbreakable sequel off the ground until now all the more mind-boggling.

Mark Wahlberg in 'The Happening'

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Image via 20th Century Fox

It’s easy enough to poke fun at this genuine Hollywood-backed whatsit, in which Shyamalan pits Mark Wahlberg and the Northeastern U.S. against an airborne compound that causes the self-preservation part of the brain to shut off. There is, of course, the famous sequence that feature Wahlberg and friends attempting to outrun…a gust of wind. The befuddlement that the film constantly generates, however, feels increasingly purposeful here, and in this, Wahlberg proves crucial to what Shyamalan attempts in The Happening and nearly succeeds at. Wahlberg is best when he’s playing playful or riled, or both, and his delivery always suggests a terminal uncertainty. Here, Shyamalan stakes him as a science teacher caught in the middle of an event that’s too big for him on a variety of levels, and that seems to be the point: a strange melodrama set against an enigmatic tide of mass suicides caused by an unknown agent. There's also an experiential vibe to the way Wahlberg’s character spends the entire film simply guessing what it is, like the viewer, and the mysteriousness of the airborne agent mirrors the paranoia and secretiveness he feels building between him and his wife (Zooey Deschanel). The film gets bogged down in wayward dialogue and atonal asides, but Wahlberg’s consistently befuddled performance nearly holds this maelstrom together.

The First 90 Minutes of 'The Village'

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Image via Buena Vista Pictures

Outside of The Lady in the Water, there isn’t a better-shot film in the Shyamalan oeuvre than The Village. Those big bright reds of the cloaks draped over the woodland monsters, suddenly and quietly breaking out of the dark; the swarms of family members scurrying into their homes, and then underneath their floors; the posts in the woods where community members watch and wait; and Adrien Brody’s troubled Noah stabbing Joaquin Phoenix’s Lucius for the love of Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard). These vividly memorable moments are mostly thanks to Roger Deakins, inarguably the most influential big-budget cinematographer in the game, and his work with Shyamalan helps craft the writer-director’s most visually rhythmic film to date, full with expertly time pans and zooms, and a handful of astonishing close-ups. The writer-director and his DP fashion a mighty genre workout, adorned with uniformly solid performances from the best cast Shyamalan ever worked with, and ruined by a trite twist ending that remains one of Shyamalan’s more notorious acts of empty revelations and thunderously inept social commentary.

The 'Wayward Pines' Pilot

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Image via Fox

If you read Collider often, you’ll know that, on the whole, I didn’t much care for Wayward Pines, the Matt Dillon-led series created by Chad Hodge (The Playboy Club) and produced by Shyamalan, who also directed the pilot. And like a great deal of Shyamalan’s post-Unbreakable, pre-The Last Airbender work, the first hour of what becomes a woefully overworked, immensely nonsensical is quite alluring and entertaining. Partially, this is due to the richness of the cast – Dillon, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo, Toby Jones, Hope Davis, and Juliette Lewis – all of whom bring out distinct characteristics in their roles through their deliveries, gestures, and physicality. The show also looks great. Shyamalan works with proven cinematographers like Amy Vincent and Jim Denault to create an odd and intermittently frightening world where stasis and comfort are more important than personal catharsis, memory, or even family. It’s a world you might want to spend some time exploring, but by the time the show’s writers and producers explain the strangeness away around the series’ halfway mark, a familiar disinterest and disbelief in the material settles in.

[Note: This original feature was initially published at a prior date.]