Three Films Make A Post: A new M. Night Shyamalan experience.

Trap (2024): Not surprising anyone who has ever heard anything I said about his films, I did have a very typical M. Night Shyamalan experience with this one, in so much as I found myself in turns annoyed, exasperated and bored by his usual approach of setting up something that could go somewhere interesting but only ever follows through to the lamest possible direction.

To the usual Shyamalan problems (I don’t feel the need to list them yet again), this one adds a dollop of nepotism when our director/writer/producer casts his daughter Saleka as a basically angelic popstar, the facts she’s not great at the whole popstar bit as well as an aggressively terrible actress notwithstanding. Josh Hartnett for his part apparently believes he’s in a comedy, and so mugs and grimaces his way through his cartoon serial killer shtick without any fear of embarrassment.

Well, at least he seems to enjoy his time with the film.

#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024): I found the first thirty minutes of Marcus Dunstan’s slasher comedy/sledgehammer satire on influencers hard going – it’s not easy spending time with characters this broadly drawn to be ridiculously horrible, nor did the first kills really catch my interest. However, once the cast is whittled down a bit and things get into a groove, Dunstan lets some of his instincts for suspense come to the fore, as well as some additional character traits in the gaggle of idiots to be destroyed.

Plus, some of the cheap nastiness actually becomes somewhat funny.

Luminous Woman aka Hikaru Onna (1987): As a lover of the weird and the woolly, I’ve often been rather disappointed with my regular inability to get much out of this sort of thing when approached from an arthouse angle. Case in point is this Shinji Somai joint full of nonsense like hairy holy innocents from Hokkaido, or underground wrestling matches that come with their own opera singers that should be just the kind of things that delight me. Yet I never found myself able to connect with any of it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Somai’s artful direction, the inventiveness of his framing of scenes, his – famous - long shots, or the way he folds time and space when he feels the need to in a way only cinema can do. In practice, however, I don’t connect to any of this, neither intellectually nor emotionally nor aesthetically, more’s the pity.

In short: Knock at the Cabin (2023)

My relationship with the films of M. Nigh Shyamalan has been long, rough, and one-sided, resulting in quite a few annoyed write-ups by me. With most directors, I’d simply have given up on their films or shelved them for a later decade (once our AI overlords abolish work for anyone but robots), and spared my imaginary readers some suffering. Thing is, on a technical level, Shyamalan has a second great film in him, he’s just not interested in making it, apparently.

Instead, we get this incredibly offensive hymn to literal sacrifice, a film that masturbates on the altar Abraham has dragged Isaac onto, and doesn’t even leave in the biblical get out of jail free card, I was only kidding, buddy. For Shyamalan, apparently worse than the godhood of the Old Testament, insists on his sacrifice. Which results in a film that exults in fulfilling the random whims of an ill-defined godhood for no reason whatsoever, instead of saying no to what the film can’t even bring itself to call a monstrosity. Ideologically and morally, this is complete opposite of the Paul Tremblay novel it supposedly adapts, by the way, and while I’m not actually much of an admirer of the writer’s body of work, that has rather more to do with his concept and execution of ambiguity rather than his books getting hot and bothered at bending the knee to abuse and monstrosity (because they do the opposite).

Apart from its moral bankruptcy (and when do you find me complaining about a film’s morality?), and some bizarre ideas (the “four human qualities” are apparently malice, nurture, healing and guidance, whatever that’s supposed to mean), the film suffers from another problem as well: namely, while I approve of Shyamalan’s decision to for once eschew his beloved, idiot, plot twist in the end, thus we get a film where everything that happens in it is laid out right at its beginning, and is indeed happening as advertised, which really isn’t how a narrative is supposed to work, last I checked. Given this, the film feels drawn out and draggy, shambling to its enraging foregone conclusion with little dramatic tension, however dramatic the score by Herdís Stefánsdóttir swells.

That this thing wastes a great performance by Dave Bautista only adds further insult to injury.

In short: Glass (2018)

Warning: I’ll spoil some elements of the film; I’d argue there’s not much to actually spoil here, though, for the idea of spoilers does suggest the existence of dramatic tension to be spoiled.

After the nearly good Split, I, the eternal optimist, was hoping its sequel, Glass, might just be that curious beast – a second M. Night Shyamalan movie making good on the great genre director The Sixth Sense had once promised.

What I then watched was pretty much the opposite: a slow and tedious crawl playing out like a bad bottle episode of a TV show that takes more than two hours to get through what’s at best a thirty minute plot (which often seems barely to exist at all anyway). You’d hope the film would at least enhance this non-experience via the mysterious arts of characterisation and mood-building, but the little personality anyone on screen shows belongs to a cast just a little too good to feel quite as empty as they are written. Why you’d cast Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy and Bruce Willis and then have them proceed to basically do no acting whatsoever, or why you’d let James McAvoy double down on his obnoxious performance in the first movie is anyone’s guess. But then, this one was written by someone (cough) who seems to believe he is - in a superhero movie in 2018 - doing something cleverly deconstructive by pointing out tropes the audience by now knows quite well from film where things are actually happening to keep them from falling asleep, and by doing a plot twist (that’s barely even a twitch) that consists of the film saying “Gotcha! You thought it was this standard ending trope! Instead I’m using this different yet even more standard ending trope! And I’m doing it as slowly and dramatically awkward as possible”!


Dramatically awkward is the watchword for the whole film. Glass is full of scenes that are slow (so slow) while having no apparent function in the narrative at all, going on for what feels like an eternity, pretending to do something immensely deep and clever the audience needs time to grasp while actually presenting not much at all. It doesn’t help here that Shyamalan seems to have lost every bit of dramatic instinct he once had. Take the triple “tragic” death scene before the end that gives two of the main characters and about a hundred of McAvoy’s personalities and their respective supporting characters way too much time to die (oh so slowly), drawing things out until even the last possibility of reacting to this nonsense with anything but laughter or eye-rolling disappears. I honestly have no idea what the filmmaker was thinking with these scenes. But then, I have no idea what he was thinking with the rest of the movie either.

Split (2016)

Three high school girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) are kidnapped by a mysterious man (James McAvoy). It soon becomes clear that he suffers from dissociative identity disorder – which may or may not exist in real life – and tries to hit the world record with 23 different personalities. Some of them – called “The Horde” by their peers even though a trio does not a horde make – have enough of everybody but their psychiatrist (Betty Buckley) not believing their disorder actually exists, and are trying to bring forth a 24th personality, known as The Beast.

The Beast, it will turn out, is a super-powered cannibal who follows some bizarre pseudo-philosophy positing that people who haven’t suffered severe enough traumata in their life are only good to be eaten because they’ll never be able to acquire super powers. Seriously.

I know, I know, I’m writing about an M. Night Shyamalan movie again, even though it’s clear by now that the man’s sensibilities work like the noise of chalk on board on me. However, Split turns out to be one of his more palatable movies for me. I wouldn’t call it a good film, mind you, but at least this one is just a handful of better directorial decisions, a minor re-write, and losing about twenty minutes of runtime away from being one. It’s what I’d call an interesting effort, and one that’s nearly on to something with its attempt to examine the connection between trauma and superpowers quite a bit of superhero comics do indeed suggest. It’s just too bad the film mostly does said examination through a very slow and even more obvious series of flashbacks concerning Taylor-Joy’s character, incessant insane ranting by McAvoy, and some pseudo-scientific warbling from the psychiatrist.

Visually, this is one of Shyamalan’s successful efforts. His films usually look slick, but here (as at the beginning of his career), the slickness goes hand in hand with an ability to craft at least decent suspense sequences and even the creation of a nice atmosphere of doom. That last one is certainly helpful when it comes to building up to the appearance of The Beast, nearly convincing one that something of apocalyptic important is going to manifest. Unfortunately, The Beast manifest is just James McAvoy mugging into the camera.


Which brings me to the film’s most surprising weakness, an inexplicably terrible performance by a really fine actor, one which becomes even worse in contrast to the measured and thoughtful ones by the always wonderful Taylor-Joy and Betty Buckley. But then, going all Nicolas Cage on us when asked to play a guy with dissociative identity disorder whose main on-screen personalities are going to be a nine-year-old, a gay fashion designer, some mumbly psycho, a woman (sorry, that’s her defining character trait apart from being evil too), and a superpowered cannibal with a messiah (well anti-Christ, because this is a Shyamalan joint) complex, is an understandable acting choice. It’s also the completely wrong one, because it stretches the suspension of disbelief asked of the audience beyond breaking point by showing off how contrived and absurd the whole thing is instead of giving it the humanity a proper acting job instead of a circus show might have provided. Of course, it usually is the director’s job to realize this sort of thing and influence an actor accordingly, last time I checked, so I suppose that’s, alas, how Shyamalan wanted it.

Three Films Make A Post: You are what they eat.

The Visit (2015): What fresh hell is this? As a rule I’m not generally getting terribly worked up over really shoddy films or undeservedly famous directors anymore (and if I do, I usually hold my peace), but after having suffered through this piece of deeply reactionary, plain stupid and generally not even funny (particularly not when it is trying to be) tripe that was clearly written by an extraterrestrial who has never met an actual human being (and certainly not a mentally ill one) in its life, I cannot help but ask myself the question: how is it possible that this thing’s “writer”/director M. Night Shyamalan is still getting regular work while guys like John Carpenter can’t scratch together enough money to make films, and many women and men with actual talent have to jump through all the worst hoops Hollywood has to offer?

Last Embrace (1979): But now to something completely different, namely Jonathan Demme’s big Hitchcock homage made in the phase of his career before Silence of the Lambs made him a big mainstream director; or as I call it “the brilliant phase”. Roy Scheider plays a spy who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital where he tried to recover from a complete breakdown he suffered through the death of his wife. But something’s not at all right with his world: is he getting paranoid or are his own people trying to get rid of him? And what about the series of murders he stumbles upon? Scheider was always particularly good at portraying a specific kind of 70s macho maleness with cracks, so he’s ideal casting for the role. Demme being Demme, every single character here is cast perfectly, of course. And this being a Hitchcock homage, Demme twists his general ability to suggest that every side character in his films has a full storyline of her or his own outside of the film to suggest that everyone has a dirty secret and nobody is who he says he is; otherwise, the film goes through the handbook of Hitchcock themes and techniques with verve, a degree of irony and wit.


Tracks (2013): I am rather fond of films about relatively solitary characters moving through a landscape while not terribly much plot or action happens, so I am rather predisposed to like John Curran’s film about Robyn Davidson’s (here portrayed by the typically brilliant Mia Wasikowska) trek through the West Australian outback and desert with some camels and her dog. But then, Curran’s film doesn’t make appreciating it terribly difficult. There’s not just Wasikowska’s ability to carry the movie, but also the beauty of the landscape (brilliantly photographed by Mandy Walker) and an idea of nature that never devolves into kitsch, as well as Curran’s way to anchor the film in its time and place. Now, you might argue that the film’s psychological side – adding the usual stuff about dead fathers to the book - is a bit too simple and on the nose but watching Tracks, I found myself thinking of it rather more as stripped down to the basics in a way that befits this trek through the desert.

After Earth (2013)

Some centuries (or more) in the future. Humanity has fled the Earth they fucked up royally and fled to the stars. Alas, their planned new home already had a owner, and we’re now quite some time into some sort of interstellar conflict where the (supposedly evil) aliens use so-called Ursa against humanity, big ugly animal-type things that smell fear.

Humanity is fighting back thanks to people who are psychically so damaged (well, that’s what I say, the film thinks it’s a-okay) they can shut off their fear completely. The best of these guys is the hilariously named Cypher Raige (Will Smith). In what it’s difficult to see as a surprising turn of events, Cypher also happens to be a crap father. His son, the only mildly less bizarrely monikered Kitai (Jaden Smith) – yes, Kitai Raige – tries to live up to his father’s legend, but doesn’t quite manage to. It’s not that he lacks the physical abilities to become a professional killer, but he’s still a kid who acts and feels like one, so the whole unhealthily shunting off an emotion that has helped humanity survive since it existed thing is rather beyond him. That he was the witness to the traumatic killing of his sister by an Ursa certainly doesn’t help there either.

Kitai will have to learn quick though, for the space ship he and his father are on crashes down on one of the most dangerous planets in the known universe: Earth itself. Surprisingly enough, the place isn’t a toxic hellhole but more of a jungle world full of nasty animals. Kitai and Cypher are the only survivors of the crash, and because Cypher has broken both of his legs, and all survival equipment in this future is built to be as breakable as possible, it’s up to Kitai to save the day.

Having a rich and famous dad really has its perks. If you play your cards right, Daddy’s going to buy you your very own survivalist SF adventure to star in. At least that’s how my cynical half reads the existence of this film. My other half enjoyed the film well enough, so I’m not too down on the Smiths, particularly since the younger Smith does comport himself better than I feared. At least, he’s a more convincing actor than his Dad was when he was young. The elder Smith for his part has developed into a decent, dependable kind of actor who sells even the ideologically dubious, and psychologically wrong-headed monologues about fear the film uses instead of actually having father and son bond like people with a degree of grace.

Otherwise, this is a perfectly entertaining little survivalist SF adventure about a teenager fighting various surprisingly crappy looking CGI animals, panicking like a teenager, and having it off with his dad. I’d have wished that the absurdly easily breakable survival equipment of this particular future wouldn’t have been an important plot point three times but then this is directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan who must have been rather confused when he realized he had to use other screen writing techniques than a big plot twist in the end, even more so since he also had to keep his religious proselytizing out and replace it with anti-psychological nonsense about fear. As a director, Shyamalan is pretty much in neutral mode here, doing a perfectly competent job without showing much personality. One might argue that’s better in his case anyway.

It is obvious that I’m not feeling particularly close to the resulting film but when it comes to SF adventure movies, you certainly can do much worse, and while the film isn’t ambitious at all, it is doing what it does well enough.