Before The Visit came M. Night Shyamalan’s early masterpiece The Village. Mismarketed and misunderstood as a horror movie, it has gained a following as a mood piece of pastoral beauty, intense emotion and stylised lyricism.
Our in-depth look at M. Night Shyamalan’s early films continues with Unbreakable: perhaps the only mainstream Hollywood formalist film, a mass-market movie approached with an unrelenting European art film sensibility.
It was one of the most hated films of the 2000s, but with the trauma now at a distance, it is time to appreciate M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water for its very real qualities.
A return to this severely under-appreciated film, for its discussion of storytelling, interpretation, film criticism, artificiality, stylisation, interconnectedness – and whether stories can become real.
As so often in films, Louder Than Bombs is not a dissertation, but a meditation on its themes and motifs. Seen in isolation, words and deeds may seem unexceptional – it is as a whole that Joachim Trier film takes flight.
A Shyamalan enthusiast is struggling mightily to come to terms with the conundrum of The Happening, a split identity film that swings wildly between excellence, rampant quirkiness and unchecked hysteria.
With the artistic, commercial and critical success of his two latest films, it is about time to soberly unearth the very real qualities of M. Night Shyamalan’s disproportionally maligned middle period.
Zeitgeist is replaced by timelessness, chamber music by a symphony. The systematically unpredictable Thelma is Joachim Trier and his team’s most sonorous, lyrical and adventurous film.
After a general evaluation of this M. Night Shyamalan tour de force, the large cast of characters and their relationships are examined, with a special emphasis on subtext and how that is expressed through mise-en-scène.
M. Night Shyamalan’s visual style consists of a series of recurring formal devices. Watching Unbreakable feels like participating in a ritual where these devices are applied and reapplied, in new variations and combinations.
Signs offers rich allegorical subtexts of dreams, magic and the aliens as metaphors for the characters’ inner demons. We also chart references to The Birds, and analyse the masterful cellar sequence and the film’s ending.
We are unable to let go of Interstellar…! This third article explores the film as an experience and its music, editing and consistency. And perhaps there are more plans in the film than Plan A and B?
A stunning piece of high-precision filmmaking, formally inventive, thematically intelligent, emotionally gripping, a momentous commercial success, an almost perfect film.
«Homesick primarily plays on the unspoken. Dialogues are marked by pauses and silent tensions between characters. Most films increase their pace towards a climax, but in Sewitsky the pauses just grow longer and more pregnant.»
This second of three analytical articles on Interstellar explores themes: identity, religion, lies and truth, inflexible worldviews, and the difference between the imagined and the experienced.
A visual analysis of key scenes of M. Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece and his virtuoso use of motifs, staging and interconnectedness to achieve coherence and closure.
M. Night Shyamalan’s enigmatic superhero thriller is a film where everything seems to be connected to everything else. We look at various motifs and colour codings that move in intricate and sometimes very strange patterns.
This is the first of three analytical articles on Christopher Nolan’s science fiction epic Interstellar. A transcendent cinematic work, whose construction and staging hold a plethora of deeply embedded patterns and structures.
