Critics reviews

Viewed again 20 years later, M. Night Shyamalan’s stealth blockbuster has a lot going for it, starting with the director’s preternatural command of pacing, blocking, and tone (all superior to his tin ear for dialogue), and yet it’s unthinkable without Willis’s against-type casting and emotionally transparent acting.

It felt like a series of disconnected, not-very-interesting incidents designed to pass the time until we got to the Big Twist that Bruce Willis' child psychiatrist Dr. Malcolm Crowe was really a ghost who was visible only to Haley Joel Osment's Cole Sear. True, belatedly learning that Crowe had been killed in the opening scene lent some of his odder interactions a retroactive poignancy. But on a pure story level, I found this underbaked.