The sky is blue, water is wet, and M. Night Shyamalan is going to use a plot twist to tell a story. Them's are just the rules of the universe, folks. Although it is true that the writer/director often traffics in the thriller genre, a house practically built on plot twists, it's inarguable that ever since The Sixth Sense put Shyamalan on the map the filmmaker has used the art of the misdirect in all of his most notable tales. That's not inherently a bad thing! Shyamalan's twists run the complete gamut from painfully ineffective to shockingly great, with a stop for pretty much every other layer of quality in-between. With Glass—a movie that was birthed from a plot twist itself—headed into theaters on January 18, I thought it was the perfect time to revisit Shyamalan's resume and see just where all these twists fall.

Now, keep in mind, this is a ranking of the twists, not a ranking of the films itself; if it was, you'd all have to get mad at me for putting Signs at number 1 because Joaquin Phoenix in a tinfoil hat brings me unmeasurable joy. Also important to note: Although we all love discussing Avatar: The Last Airbender and After Earth, neither really has a twist worth talking about. Shyamalan wrote the twist in Devil—the old lady is Satan, a pretty gnarly twist!—but director John Erick Dowdle executed it, so that's not included. Finally, I truly believe the only twist in Lady in the Water is the fact no one in M. Night Shyamalan's life gently told him that scripting yourself into a movie as a universe-changing writer might be a bad idea.

With all that out of the way, here are the many plot twists of M. Night Shyamalan's career, ranked from worst to best. This piece includes *spoilers* for The Happening, The Sixth Sense, Signs, Split, Unbreakable, and The Visit. I mean, duh.

7) 'Signs' - The Aliens Are Allergic to Water

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Image via Buena Vista Pictures

I actually kind of love SignsShyamalan's genuinely spooky tale of extraterrestrials harassing an isolated Pennsylvania farmhouse before a full-scale invasion. I don't even dislike the intent of the twist, which sees Mel Gibson's Father Graham Hess regaining his faith after a series of happenstances and memories converge randomly at the perfect moment. But lord, lord, the sloppiness of scripting one of those random circumstances to make the aliens deathly allergic to water. Water. It's a twist that retroactively makes the threat of the film feel flimsy, these intergalactic dumb-dumbs who invented space travel but didn't call ahead to see if it rains on Earth. Imagine if we invaded a planet that was 70% lava and were like "who could have foreseen this?" while we melted.

6) 'The Happening' - Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill Us

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Look, I get what Shyamalan was going for with The Happening—the filmmaker has explained it's a big-budget B-movie several times—and a downright wonky performance from Mark Wahlberg aside, there are some genuine thrills to be had in the filmmaker's first R-rated movie. But after Lady in the Water, Shyamalan had also completely forgotten how to let a theme just be a theme and not wallop you in the face with an explanation. The Happening's reveal that the mass suicides taking place are not a biological attack but the result of nature literally fighting back against the human race's presence on the planet is such an in-your-face message about environmentalism that every rewatch is a new nosebleed.

5) 'The Village' - We've Been In Modern Day the Whole Time

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Image via Disney/Buena Vista Pictures

As a moody piece, The Village holds up surprisingly well. Shyamalan—with an as-always MVP assist from cinematographer Roger Deakins—does a lot with a little in terms of tension with this film about an isolated, technology-less community in rural Pennsylvania during what appears to be the 1800s. There are monsters in them there woods, Those We Don't Speak Of, hulking creatures in red robes with long, twiggy-y claws and...whoops, nope, the monsters aren't real, and we aren't in the 1800s, either. The script sends poor, blind Ivy Elizabeth Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) into the woods and out the other side to discover that the film is actually set in a modern day setting. Ivy Elizabeth's father Edward Walker (William Hurt) founded the village in the 1970s as a social experiment in grief counseling, inventing the grammatically incorrect monsters in the woods as a barrier against the outside world.

The Village's twist wasn't so much bad at the time as it was painfully boring. It felt inevitable the entire film. Six years after The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan was at his peak as The Twist Guy, and here he crafted something that doesn't help or hurt the story, it just...happens. Roger Ebert, the G.O.A.T., put it better than I ever could: "To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes."

4) 'Unbreakable' - This Is Also Mr. Glass' Supervillain Origin Story

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Image via Touchstone

The reactions to Glass might be all sorts of divided—if you thought I was going to say split, how dare you—but Unbreakable, the film that kicked off Shyamalan's philosophical superhero trilogy, is still up there with his most emotionally resonant work. Which is why the film's end reveal might be the filmmaker's best example of a cinematic magic trick, making the audience look left while an entirely different feat is being pulled off on the right. The story of everyman David Dunn (Bruce Willis) discovering he is an invincible Superman straight out of a comic book is such an engrossing slow-build take on a classic origin story—rooted in the inherently heroic father-son relationship David shares with his son (Spencer Treat Clark)—that we don't even notice that it doubles as a supervillain origin for Samuel L. Jackson's brittle-boned Elijah Price, who caused the deadly train crash that revealed David's powers.

The best part of this twist is the fact it's one we should have noticed, if only anyone was as obsessed with comic book storytelling tropes as Price himself. "In the comics, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain is going to be?" the once-and-future Mr. Glass asks David. "He's the exact opposite of the hero. And most times they're friends, like you and me."

3) 'The Visit' - Nana and Pop-Pop Are Actually Escaped Mental Patients

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Image via Universal Pictures

What I really enjoy about the plot twist in Shyamalan's 2015 found-footage comeback The Visit is that, compared to all the other shocks here, it's not big or completely story-upending, it's just a nasty little twist of the knife. Two Philadelphia kids, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) meet their grandparents for the first time, who promptly begin to project vomit around the house, collect dirty diapers in the garage, and generally give off a definite batshit insane vibe. Turns out, Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop-Pop (Peter McRobbie) are batshit insane, as they are, in fact, two escaped mental patients who murdered Becca and Tyler's actual grandparents and hid the bodies in the basement. The Visit nails the silly-scary B-movie vibe that Shyamalan whiffed so hard on with The Happening, and this plot twist fits right into that tone, unsettling and outrageous in the same popcorn-throwing way as, say, a similar corpse hidden in the basement for Hitchcock's Psycho.

2) 'Split' - A Secret 'Unbreakable' Spinoff

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Image via Universal

The nerve of this twist. Two years after experiencing Split in a packed theater and I still vividly remember the closing moments transforming me into that "I can't believe you've done this" Vine in the most magical way possible. Following an entire film introducing the world to James McAvoy's Kevin Wendell Crumb—a DID-sufferer who shuffles through 24 distinct personalities, including the superhumanly violent Beast—Shyamalan tacks on a stinger that reveals that the movie you just watched took place in the same universe as Unbreakable, and Crumb being dubbed "The Horde" has just given Bruce Willis' David Dunn a new ripped-from-the-comics adversary.

More so than any of Shyamalan's other twists, this one was practically begging to be rejected. What if Split was...bad? Or, possibly even more likely, what if sixteen years and numerous flops after Unbreakable, moviegoers simply didn't care? But Split, a tense, tight, entertaining two hours, turned out to be Shyamalan's definitive return-to-form, and the hype for a Dunn v. Crumb showdown was palpable.

1) 'The Sixth Sense' - Bruce Willis Was Dead the Whole Time

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Image via Buena Vista Distribution

This almost feels like a cop-out, but what would you have me do? On the Mount Rushmore of plot twists that, for better or worse, completely changed the game—next to "A boy's best friend is his mother", "I am your father", and "You met me at a very strange time in my life"—The Sixth Sense's reveal that Bruce Willis' Dr. Malcolm Crowe has been dead from the film's first scene hangs quiet and heavy. It's Shyamalan's personal best twist because it also demonstrates all his best traits as a filmmaker. Over the years he's grown tremendously un-subtle, but watch The Sixth Sense over and over and you'll notice the eventual twist reveals itself with a shockingly gentle touch. It's all hushed-voice hints and averted glances. The scene where Crowe meets his wife Anna (Olivia Williams) at a restaurant is a masterclass in eyeline and dialogue not spoken. And that's the thing; it could have been so obvious, but Shyamalan walks this story on such a razor-sharp, emotional line that we accept the aching pain of a crumbling marriage over the plot twist that's being spelled out for us in whispers. A good twist retroactively makes a movie better; this one made The Sixth Sense a classic.

For more Shyamalan, check out the links below:

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Image via Buena Vista Distribution