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.

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.

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.

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.

A stunning piece of high-precision filmmaking, formally inventive, thematically intelligent, emotionally gripping, a momentous commercial success, an almost perfect film. [1]

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 conclude our in-depth analysis of M. Night Shyamalan's masterpiece with a close look at motifs and structural aspects, concluding with a shot-by-shot commentary on the post-funeral sequence.

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.

The cat-and-mouse sessions between psychiatrist and patient form a thrilling acting laboratory, where M. Night Shyamalan's fundamentally static set-ups are done with rigour and discreet invention. Bonus: film references.