How M Night Shyamalan became the master of the plot twist

There's a new M Night Shyamalan movie heading into cinemas, which means everyone's plot twist radar will be sounding wildly. In fact, we already know about one key twist in his movie Trap — the caring father taking his daughter to a pop concert is actually the serial killer police have arranged the entire concert to capture.

Of course, those of us who've followed Shyamalan's eclectic career know that there will be plenty more surprises where that came from. Say what you like about the ups and downs of Shyamalan's output, but he's a filmmaker who simply adores taking creative risks — usually in the form of audacious, late in the day rug-pulls that completely reshape the story.

But this hasn't always been a part of Shyamalan's repertoire. His first two movies — Praying with Anger and Wide Awake — were low-key dramas and he also worked as a writer on comedies including Stuart Little and She's All That in the 1990s. Not a twist in sight.

That all changed in 1999 with a little movie called The Sixth Sense. Suddenly, Shyamalan was one of the most exciting new faces in Hollywood — and the man responsible for one of the greatest plot twists in cinema history.

It's easy to forget that, even before its blockbuster twist, The Sixth Sense is a very accomplished scary movie. It follows Bruce Willis as a child psychologist trying to help a kid who believes he can see dead people. There are chills aplenty, even before we learn that Willis has actually been dead the whole time, and doesn't even know it.

The Sixth Sense was beaten only by the return of Star Wars at that year's box office and got six Oscar nominations. This made Shyamalan the sort of person who could get a plum deal from Disney for a spec script he had written — a spec script called Unbreakable, about a man with superhuman abilities.

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Unbreakable is, for most of its runtime, a thoughtful take on the then-new superhero movie genre, right up until the final revelation that Bruce Willis' hero has been created and manipulated by a murderous super-villain — Samuel L Jackson's Mr Glass.

But the movie that cemented Shyamalan as the master of the twist might well have been the one that came next — 2002's alien invasion movie Signs. Thankfully, the film is remembered more these days for one brilliant scare than it is for the bizarre revelation that the aliens invading a planet made up almost entirely of water were deathly allergic... to water.

By this stage, the Shyamalan twist was as much a figure of fun and derision as it was of intrigue. Three divisive reveals then followed, starting with The Village's contrived revelation that its supposedly 19th-century story was actually taking place in the modern day.

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Then, the Razzie-nominated Lady in the Water seemed to include a very contrived and overly complicated late-in-the-day twist just because it's what was expected of Shyamalan. By the time The Happening came about in 2008 with its revelations about killer plants, the idea of the Shyamalan twist had veered a long way from how much people loved The Sixth Sense. He'd become a parody of himself.

So at this point, Shyamalan changed tack. He'd been linked to blockbuster franchises like Indiana Jones and Harry Potter over the years, but finally took the big-money plunge with his disastrous 2010 take on The Last Airbender. He followed this up in 2013 by directing Will Smith and his son Jaden in the rubbish sci-fi adventure After Earth.

Shyamalan needed a reset and a return to his roots. His meteoric rise had seen his big swings start to look like folly and he didn't fare any better by trapping himself within franchise confines. His response was the ludicrous and darkly entertaining 2015 thriller The Visit, in which the idea of the Shyamalan twist returned with a vengeance.

The director put a huge amount of his own cash into The Visit and eventually convinced Blumhouse to release it. It follows a pair of siblings sent to live with their estranged grandparents, who in a brilliantly-played twist realise that the odd couple they're with are not in fact their grandparents at all. Shyamalan leans into the comic ridiculousness of his own reputation here to great effect, conjuring a pitch-black comedy that's grubby and unforgettable.

Shyamalan leveraged the box office success of The Visit to create Split which, on the surface, was another down-and-dirty horror movie. But in its final moments, it unveiled Bruce Willis in a cameo as his Unbreakable character in a moment of audacious — and very, very stupid — shared universe storytelling that made Marvel look modest. That connection birthed the movie Glass, which was a convoluted enough mess to show that Shyamalan maybe should've stayed away from the franchise model.

Next up, Shyamalan mounted a pair of adaptations, reshaping the source material with his trademark twists. His 2021 movie Old spawned dozens of memes about "the beach that makes you old" and then grafted an unhinged, over-complicated conspiracy about a pharmaceutical company on to the end of a creepy graphic novel about a supernatural beach.

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He took a similar approach to Knock at the Cabin, which was based on a spooky novel by Paul Tremblay, adding an ending that removed all ambiguity. In Old, this Shyamalan flavour completely toppled the movie but, in Knock at the Cabin, the storytelling and characters are strong enough to hold steady despite the machinations. Like so many of Shyamalan's best works, it succeeds because there's more at play than just waiting for a twist.

It remains to be seen which side of the fence Trap will fall upon. Critics in the USA have called the film "fiendishly clever" and praised its structure, as well as Josh Hartnett's lead performance. The ingredients are there for a Shyamalan masterclass but, as we've discussed, that can very much go either way.

The joy of Shyamalan is also what makes so many of his movies flounder. He's great at atmosphere and has more of an eye for heartfelt characters than people realise, but he too often gets in his own way in a desire to live up to his reputation as king of the plot twist.

25 years on from Haley Joel Osment seeing dead people and with his career back on track after some time in the wilderness, Shyamalan firmly embraces that title. And he should.

Trap is released in UK cinemas on 9 August.