M Night Shyamalan's writing may still be his calling card, despite multiple critical flops

Considered to be the second film of his fabled second-act, M Night Shyamalan’s Glass (2019) has made nearly US $73.5 million in the first ten days of its release and reaffirmed Hollywood’s faith in someone who was literally in director’s hell just five years ago. There have been a few critics that felt Glass fell short of what it was capable of achieving keeping in mind the return to form of the film’s writer-director. As a result, a discussion has ensued that questions whether Shyamalan would become a more successful director in his second phase if he were to stop writing his own scripts.

A few years ago, Shyamalan was nearly relegated to the margins of Hollywood. The general perception was that he, who was once considered to be the heir to Steven Spielberg, was done. His credentials as a writer-director took a beating on two occasions - the first was with the release of Lady in the Water (2006), a fantasy where a water nymph finds her self in an apartment complex. Shyamalan would often write parts for himself in his scripts and he even wrote himself a quasi second-lead part once. Critics and audiences alike panned the ill-fated film. The suspected Shyamalan megalomania was on full display and it was almost impossible to not see a mass eye-roll the moment his name was mentioned. The change in his standing began with The Village (2004), which became the butt of many jokes regarding Shyamalan’s fabled signature - the unexpected twist towards the end.

It took him a couple of years to come up with his next films, an environmental thriller called The Happening (2008) which turned out to be such a letdown that the film’s lead, Mark Wahlberg, later called it a “bad movie”. The next blow to Shyamalan came with the two films that followed: The Last Airbender (2010) and After Earth (2013). Both were unmitigated flops. In between the two, Shyamalan had a film called Devil (2010) that he only produced but his name in the credits, once again, evoked the same reaction. It was around this time that Shyamalan’s brand took a severe beating and people began to comment that he ought to just write screenplays or simply get someone else to write the films he wanted to direct.

In a decade and a half since The Sixth Sense (1999), Shyamalan had directed seven films, all scripted by him. The flops notwithstanding, he commanded enough respect as a modern day auteur. Most of his films showcase an immensely gifted filmmaker, who, on his day, can seamlessly blend characters, moods, and the rhythm of storytelling both visually and aurally to create great art. It is one thing to say that he essentially follows the same pattern, and if seen outside of the universe his narrative functions, nearly every single story of his falls flat. But apply that logic to Quentin Tarantino, who is considered a modern day great and an auteur in the classical sense of the word, and you could perhaps apply the criticism to him. Consider Inglorious Basterds (2009) outside of the Tarantino realm and suddenly it comes across as an infantile fantasy: a film set in the Second World War where a bunch of elite Jewish Allied forces kill Hitler.

There is no doubt that Shyamalan’s prowess would find it tougher to come through if he were to carry on doing what he does best. He tried making a comeback a few years ago by directing a Twin Peaks-like TV show titled Wayward Pines (2015), self-financing a US$ 5 million found footage horror film, The Visit (2015), which was rejected by nearly all the studios when they saw the first cut. Then, he made Split (2016) with US$ 9 million of his own money. The film not only became a US$ 280 million hit but also created a character that could be connected with Unbreakable, an earlier film of his. Unbreakable got a sequel after 18 years. The sequence of events strengthened a particular notion: Shyamalan could still strike gold.

For someone who was not able to get a film financed after grossing nearly 1 billion USD in box office collections, it was Shyamalan’s “ever-present marquee value” that got Bruce Willis to reprise his character from Unbreakable in a cameo in Split; both films were produced by different studios. Do critics have a point in suggesting that Shyamalan should get someone else to write his scripts? The Shyamalan calling card — the hidden but somewhat expected twist — might have become jaded but the fact that his brand can still pull it off suggests that Shyamalan the writer might still the best bet to come up with a vintage M Night Shyamalan film.