When David Lynch passed away on January 15, 2025, I felt as if I had lost a deformed twin brother whom I admired greatly but also feared.

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. [1]

A final look at M. Night Shyamalan's Split, this time its formal approach with a special emphasis on his inventive use of point-of-view shots, stealthy camera movements, overhead and underhead shots, and many other subtleties.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

A guide to the many powerful suicide scenes, including the brilliant, icily electrifying opening where normality turns into nightmare. Plus motifs, visual ideas and references to earlier Shyamalan works.

The new leaner, meaner version of M. Night Shyamalan has made a bizarre but thoroughly gripping film, providing an emotionally deep understanding of why psychological survival mechanisms arise in abuse victims.

An initial response to the narratively complex and structurally beautiful Glass, which concludes the diverse trilogy of the meditative mood piece Unbreakable and the character-oriented suspense film Split.

Whispered echoes, nightmare logic, high melodrama, relentlessly ingenious staging – this visual analysis of M. Night Shyamalan's pastoral masterpiece preserves the film's own gestures, often rearranged in surprising combinations.

M. Night Shyamalan is particularly adept at creating a set of hidden motifs that govern the film. We look at circles, water, doors, houses, the sky and how they operate in two brilliant horror set pieces.

We look at three outstanding scenes in this better-than-you-think M. Night Shyamalan film, along with its pervasive motif of figures in a landscape, visual rhymes and many occasions of elegant staging.

«Upon its release, Raymond Bernards Les Croix de bois (1932) was seen as a pacifist march of death.»

«Her life as a mother dictated what spaces she would film in. Her feminist I takes place in the film, in the frame, behind and within the camera. Her installations are inhabitable, a shed of cinema to walk through and be within.»