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Of course, as reviews and word-of-mouth have spelled out to all but resolute non-moviegoers, this is an elaborate trick picture about the relationship between a second-sighted child (played by the astonishing Haley Joel Osment) and a devoted psychologist (Bruce Willis). In the first scene, Willis and Olivia Williams (as his wife) admire the beautiful frame around an award he received for helping troubled kids. In retrospect, it's an obvious pun, since the frame of the story provides the main narrative kick. To squeeze a dramatic and visual jigsaw puzzle within this frame, the writer-director, M. Night Shyamalan, plots and stages the action so oddly that he ends up putting off one segment of the audience and planting suspicions in another. Without giving anything away, all I can say is that long before the halfway mark, I turned to a friend and asked why Willis wasn't talking to anyone except the boy.

My guess is that people who get roped into "The Sixth Sense" stay because of the freaky potency of young Osment's performance. His eloquent alienation, and the palpable yearning for fatherly guidance that connects him to Willis, can make even the most badly telegraphed action emotionally engulfing.

Osment is a find. His trembling figure works for the movie like an unlucky charm. Whenever he's center screen, he focuses your sympathy and enlarges your awareness of a child's awesome sense of fate. Although Osment has been praised for giving the boy's visions their persuasive oomph, he seems to understand his character's agony as an extension of any sensitive child's trials. His actions are simultaneously natural and italicized, starting when he puts on his absent dad's eyeglasses and for a moment looks as bug-eyed as Jiminy Cricket. What makes his oblong face magnetic isn't its downturned cast, but the way his intelligence and feelings funnel down from his eyes to his mouth. When he tells a teacher not to look at him, he's like any shy child, only more so; he's sure that he's being pigeonholed and knows he can't fully explain himself.

But if Osment's performance is a genuine act of imagination, it's not enough to make me recommend the movie. The director fits him all too snugly into a shallow, pessimistic portrayal of marriage and family life. Early on we discover that Osment's dad has left his mom (the blessedly robust Toni Collette) for a woman in Pittsburgh (I hope stigmata aren't catching). One of Osment's typical visions is of a woman slashing her own wrists as her only way of getting back at an abusive husband. A key sequence rests on another mother poisoning her daughter.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

When Osment finally gets around to telling his mother that he consorts with ghosts, he tells her that his grandmother, contrary to what mom always thought, had indeed seen her dance at a long-ago recital and said she performed "like an angel" -- presumably the highest compliment a ghost can pay. In this film, a mother and child reunion is only a spectral motion away. And boy, do these people need that sort of communion. In the freighted opening scene, Williams pointedly tells Willis that he deserves a professional award because he's placed the rest of his life -- including her -- second to his work. No wonder his prize patient can find sanctuary only in church.

How does any of this make "The Sixth Sense" a "psychological horror movie," as it's usually described? "The Sixth Sense" would best be called mood moviemaking -- bad-mood moviemaking. If it's about anything, it's not about psychology, but belief.

Together, these movies drove me back to the 1949 British gem "The Rocking Horse Winner," a bona fide psychological horror film based on the D.H. Lawrence story about a gifted child who tries to correct the sins of his elders. Although it's set in the lower reaches of the privileged class, not in the lower-middle-class of "Sixth Sense" or "Stir of Echoes," it has many of the same tensions: The young antihero becomes obsessed with horse racing because of his unhappily married mom and dad's financial woes. He feels that their house itself is telling him that they need more money, and he acquires a knack for picking winners when he rides his rocking horse at fever pitch. His obsession grows dire -- and the visage of the rocking horse menacing.

But the tale gets its power from the boy's tragic relationships. An amused, cynical uncle and the family's affable driver/gardener don't see that the boy is nearing the abyss; his grasping mother sees it too late. Is the boy simply on an unfathomable betting streak? Or is the rocking horse a sort of man-made demon? In "The Rocking Horse Winner," unlike would-be psychological horror films, the ambiguity is unresolved, the terror comes from worldly drives and religion is no panacea. What this boy gets for Christmas is the rocking horse that kills him.
salon.com | Sept. 16, 1999

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