What’s happened to M. Night Shyamalan?

By N.B.

AT THE turn of the millennium, M. Night Shyamalan was the “boy wonder” of American cinema. Beginning with his third feature film, “The Sixth Sense” in 1999, he wrote and directed a run of acclaimed dramas, each of which revitalised a pulp genre—ghost story, superhero adventure, alien invasion shocker—by injecting it with a brooding tone and a twist ending. Unfortunately, this winning formula soon became a losing one. “The Happening” and “The Last Airbender” were just two of the stinkers which followed, and Mr Shyamalan, once hailed as “the next Spielberg”, was called some less complimentary names instead.

Last year’s “Split” looked as if it would be a turning point. As well as being a partial return to form, this low-budget chiller was set in the fictional world that Mr Shyamalan established in “Unbreakable” in 2000. In that film, Bruce Willis starred as David Dunn, a security guard who learns that he has superhuman strength and resilience, as well as a sixth sense (to quote the title of Mr Shyamalan’s breakthrough film) for detecting evil. He also learns that an acquaintance, a comic-book enthusiast named Mr Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), is a criminal mastermind—and the viewer gathers that what began as a gloomy supernatural mystery is actually a superhero origin movie.

Mr Shyamalan played a similar trick in “Split”. Produced by Hollywood’s current king of horror, Jason Blum, “Split” was marketed as a torture-porn movie about a serial killer, Kevin (James McAvoy), who has a whole crowd of distinct personalities. Each of these personalities has his or her own accent and mannerisms, and so the film is, on one level, an extended audition tape in which Mr McAvoy shows off his versatility as well as his honed physique. The twist is that one of those personalities is a wall-scaling savage called The Beast, which means that Kevin is a bona fide supervillain. A further twist is that The Beast—essentially a hybrid of Spider-Man and the Hulk—lives just down the street from David and Mr Glass from “Unbreakable”. Never lacking in self-importance, Mr Shyamalan had decided that if Marvel and DC’s superheroes could inhabit their own cinematic universe, then his characters could, too.

The gimmick behind his new film, “Glass”, is that Kevin, David and Mr Glass aren’t just in the same city, they are in the same wing of the same psychiatric hospital. Specifically, it is one of those understaffed and underlit only-in-the-movies psychiatric hospitals in which notoriously dangerous, devious and/or homicidal inmates are accorded a degree of security which would be deemed inadequate for a city-centre pub on a Friday night. While the men are there, Ellie Staple, an enigmatic psychiatrist (Sarah Paulson), tries to convince them that, rather than being super-powered, they are really just poor saps who have read too many comics. It is a disastrously bad premise.

Anyone who has seen “Unbreakable” and “Split”—and “Glass” won’t make much sense if you haven’t—knows that David and Kevin are capable of extraordinary feats. The viewer knows that Staple is wrong about them. The characters themselves know that Staple is wrong about them. And yet an hour of “Glass” consists of her sitting opposite the three men, and having slow, stilted, cod-philosophical conversations in which she argues that they have delusions of grandeur. Mr Shyamalan being Mr Shyamalan, there is a twist later on. Franchise movies being franchise movies, there is a stack of mythology and backstory to get through. But the fact remains that “Glass” has barely enough incident for an hour-long pilot of a Netflix series, let alone a two-hour-long film.

Mr Shyamalan may think that the threadbare plot will be forgiven because he is willing to be solemn and thoughtful about something as inherently childish as superheroes. Perhaps he hopes that a superhero film in which people acknowledge the existence of superhero comics will be seen as dazzlingly postmodern. But while such convictions could be justified when he made “Unbreakable”, they now seem embarrassingly ignorant and patronising.

The first modern superhero movie was “X-Men”, which came out in July 2000. “Unbreakable” was released a few months later, so films which took superheroes seriously were still a refreshing novelty. Nineteen years on, there have been dozens of blockbusters, indie dramas and television shows which have, to some extent, done what Mr Shyamalan did in “Unbreakable”: that is, they have depicted comic-book characters as flesh-and-blood individuals who exist in a recognisable reality. Hasn’t Mr Shyamalan heard of “The Avengers” or “Daredevil” or “Logan” or “Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice” or “Kick-Ass” or “The Dark Knight” or “Watchmen” or, indeed, the numerous “X-Men” and “Avengers” movies featuring Mr McAvoy and Mr Jackson, respectively? Apparently not. Mr Shyamalan may wish he could go back to a time when his films were pop-cultural phenomena, but the entertainment industry has moved on since then.