M. Night Shyamalan was, at one time, considered the second-coming of Steven Spielberg. Magazine covers praised the director following his breakout hit The Sixth Sense, and he won over even more fans with his follow-up movie, Unbreakable. However, he stumbled along the way, falling into the trap of having twist endings in all his movies and becoming a joke to many movie fans.
Shyamalan enjoyed a return to form two decades later, first with a found-footage movie produced by Blumhouse (The Visit) and then returning to the Unbreakable universe, with Split and Glass. A rare director who mostly makes only movies he writes, he created some well-written characters over the years.
Merrill Hess – Signs (2002)
Joaquin Phoenix has really come into his own in the last decade, picking up critical acclaim for many of his movie roles. He has picked up four Oscars over his career, winning one for playing Joker in the 2020 movie based on the character. In 2002, he starred as Merrill Hess in Shyamalan’s Signs.
He was the younger brother of Mel Gibson’s Graham Hess and the uncle to two big-time child stars in Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin. Phoenix matched up well with Gibson in the alien invasion movie, the last Shyamalan movie to receive critical acclaim for over a decade.
Cole Sear – Sixth Sense (1999)
Sixth Sense made Haley Joel Osment a star. In the movie, Bruce Willis played a child psychologist named Malcolm Crowe, a man who feels he failed one of his patients. When he meets young Cole, he feels he has a chance at redemption, as the young boy claims he can see ghosts, and they are everywhere.
The role forces Cole to show great emotion and distress, and by the time the twist ending comes, it proves that he was spot on in his portrayal of the tormented child.
Ivy Elizabeth Walker – The Village (2004)
At the time, critics and viewers alike ravaged The Village due to its twist ending. However, the movie sets up that ending well, with the people in the village proving to be untrustworthy and even the monster hunting the people proving to be fake.
Bryce Dallas Howard had to carry this movie, and she did as well as she could considering the rug-pull twist, as Ivy Elizabeth Walker, someone who knows there is something wrong and not putting her finger on it until it is almost too late.
Cleveland Heep – Lady In The Water (2006)
Another M. Night Shyamalan movie that critics hated was the 2006 release, Lady in the Water. The movie’s dismissal was due to critics feeling that Shyamalan was trying too hard to write something autobiographical and detailed his feeling that critics abused him due to his movies.
Shyamalan stars in the movie as a tortured writer while Paul Giamatti plays Cleveland Heep, the Philadelphia apartment complex superintendent. When a water nymph arrives, she asks to meet a writer who will one day write an important story that will inspire others. And Giamatti is the man who brings them together.
Graham Hess – Signs (2002)
Mel Gibson was still on top of his game in 2002 when M. Night Shyamalan cast him as the lead in Signs.
In the movie, Gibson plays a former priest who lives with his younger brother and two children after his wife’s death. He is depressed and has lapsed in his religion, feeling he has lost everything. However, an alien invasion forces him to stand and fight for his remaining family members, which ends up helping him rediscover his faith.
Anya Taylor-Joy – Split (2016) / Glass (2019)
Anya Taylor-Joy has become one of the top actresses working today and recently turned heads in the Netflix original series The Queen’s Gambit. In 2016, she was the de facto Final Girl in the M. Night Shyamalan movie Split.
Taylor-Joy played Casey Cooke, a teenage girl with a traumatic past who Kevin Wendell Crumb chose to become a sacrifice to the Beast. Her backstory of abuse made her much deeper than many other Final Girls, and she even played an important part in the next movie, Glass, as she was there to help stop Kevin once and for all.
David Dunn – Unbreakable (2000) / Glass (2019)
David Dunn is a character who has appeared in three M. Night Shyamalan movies, giving him a lot of room for character development. Played by Bruce Willis, David was a security guard who survived a largely fatal train crash. This gave him superhuman strength and durability.
In Unbreakable, he had to come to terms with his role in the world and set out to become a hero that helped others. By the time Glass rolled around, he was older and still fighting, now with his son as his “man in the chair,” but he was still broken and needed to figure out what his role in this was.
Malcolm Crowe – Sixth Sense (1999)
A second Bruce Willis role, Malcolm Crowe, was a character in the movie that made M. Night Shyamalan a star. In Sixth Sense, Malcolm was a child psychologist who believed he failed a patient. When that patient showed up at his house and died, Malcolm was lost and believed he found a way to redeem himself with a new patient, a young boy who sees ghosts.
The fact that Malcolm is a ghost makes this one of the most rewatchable movies ever made, with clues strung throughout and one of Willis’s best roles in his career.
Mr. Glass – Unbreakable (2000) / Glass (2019)
Mr. Glass was the villain from Unbreakable and one of the villains from Glass. Played by Samuel L. Jackson, Mr. Glass was the opposite of David Dunn.
While Dunn had super strength and was “unbreakable,” Mr. Glass suffered from a disease since he was a child where his bones were fragile, and even the smallest fall could break him. He was a figure whose past made his story a tragedy but was so angry that he couldn’t be anything less than the villain in his own story.
Kevin Wendell Crumb – Split (2016) / Glass (2019)
The best-written character in M. Night Shyamalan’s career is easily Kevin Wendell Crumb, played brilliantly by James McAvoy. This character is far from an accurate representation of dissociative identity disorder, but it is a brilliant fictional representation of a broken man in a monster movie.
Kevin is like Jekyll and Hyde times twenty-three, and McAvoy flips from personality to personality without missing a beat. While Unbreakable was Shyamalan at his best, Crumb in Split is M. Night creating his best character.
