User:HumanxAnthro/sandbox/Twist endings in M. Night Shyamalan

One of the most notable traits of the works of American filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is their twist endings.

Wide Awake (1998)
Shyamalan's first recorded use of a twist ending was in Wide Awake (1998), which depicts the spiritual journey of a Catholic kid named Joshua after his grandfather dies of bone-marrow cancer. He makes a friend along the way, Dave, who suffers from epilepsy; the twist is that Dave is a ghost, as he gives Joshua a message from his grandfather.

The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Sixth Sense (1999) depicts child psychologist Malcolm Crowe treating a kid, Cole, who claims to see ghosts; as the film progresses, the ghosts don't think their dead, and it is revealed in the end that Malcolm is a ghost. This explained why all the characters besides Cole never talk to Malcolm throughout the film.

Unbreakable (2000)
In Unbreakable (2000), David Dunn, a character unaware he has superhuman abilities, is mentored by comic book expert Elijah Price about being a superhero. The twist is that Price, was also has superhuman abilities but is limited with brittle bones he was born with, staged several life-causing disasters to look for a survivor just as strong as him without broken bones, including the train-wreck Dunn experienced at the film's beginning. The twist was far more abruptly revealed than The Sixth Sense's.

Darren Franich praised how the film was "perfectly composed" about Elijah's secret villainy, where it "was quite literally hiding in plain sight the whole time".

Signs (2002)
Signs depicts the Hess family, who live in a Pennsylvania farmhouse, defending itself from an alien invasion. During a climatic altercation with an alien, the family finds the extraterrestrials' weakness is water; it is also revealed God set the family to destroy the creatures through the wife's final words before her death in a car accident, daughter Bo placing glasses of water throughout the house, and son Merrill being a former baseball player.

Kevin Wong and Vinnie Mancuso criticized the ending for making the very-intelligent aliens look dull-witted.

The Village (2004)
The time period of The Village (2004) is actually the present time, which is the twist. Wong found the twist "a touch too silly", especially given the "logic leaps and weird pacing issues".

Lady in the Water (2006)
In Lady in the Water (2006), Heep attempts to save a fairytale "Narf" named Story on the run from the wolf-like monsters "Scrunts"; his method is to use fairytale tropes to give her a happy ending, but it doesn't work as, according to Story, all of them aren't true.

The Happening (2008)
The twist ending of The Happening (2008), a science fiction thriller about a mysterious epidemic of mass suicides, is that plants are releasing toxin making the humans kill themselves. d

Devil (2010)
Devil (2010) follows a group of people stuck in a elevator, one of whom is the devil. The devil is revealed to be the Old Woman (Jenny O'Hara).

The Visit (2015)
The Visit depicts two kids who have strange occurrences sleeping over at their grandparents' home. The twist is that their real grandparents are dead, and they've been actually staying with murderous mental institution escapees that took ownership of the home once the real grandparents died.

Opined Kevin Wong, "It's such a bold, left-field narrative stroke, but it's also entirely fair; there's no hocus pocus or narrative cheats, and the clues are there upon a second viewing."

Split (2016)
At the end of Split (2016), David Dunn, a character in Unbreakable, appears and Mr. Glass is referenced, indicating it to be a sequel to Unbreakable. Split's main character, Kevin, was in early drafts of Unbreakable, but Shyamalan found him taking up too much space and was removed. Immediately from the start of writing Split, the filmmaker planned for it to be about Kevin as well as a sequel and origin story the audience doesn't know it is until the end. Journalist Germain Lussier called the twist ending Shyamalan's best since The Sixth Sense.

Glass (2019)
In Glass (2019), it turns out Elijah Price filmed the superheroes and uploaded them as viral videos to potentially motivate other super-powered individuals to come forward.

Old (2021)
Based on the French-language Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, Old (2021) is about tourists who are abandoned on a beach and rapidly within a few days. The twist is that the beach is actually a medical experiment lab and not a real beach. This is an original plot element by Shyamalan, as the source material never explained the characters' fast aging.

Shyamalan's perspective on twist endings
According to Shyamalan, he incorporates twist endings to mess with audiences' perception of a typical plot structure, to feel like they're in a "different story" then what they predicted, which he finds "fun by its nature".