‘Remain’s’ First Reactions Have Me Excited for M. Night Shyamalan Again

M. Night Shyamalan surprised Beyond Fest attendees with a screening of Remain last night, and the first reactions are making the wait for his supernatural romance a little harder. Viewers expecting The Sixth Sense got an early look at his next film, with praise for its scares, humor, romance, and vulnerability.

It’s been a wild, wild ride being a fan who has lived through Shyamalan’s entire career. And Remain might be the first time I’ve been this genuinely excited for one of his movies since Signs.

When Shyamalan broke through with The Sixth Sense in 1999, it felt a little like what we’re seeing now with Curry Barker and Obsession. Someone who already had experience suddenly connected with audiences through something big and personal, and everything changed. The Sixth Sense was Shyamalan’s Obsession, the enormous breakout that made everyone wonder what he would do next.

Living through that moment as a fan, it’s hard to overstate the expectations. People were calling him the next Steven Spielberg. I carried all of that into Unbreakable the following year and came away hugely disappointed.

Shyamalan had also become associated with the kind of storytelling we connected to Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling. You went into his movies waiting for a shocking twist, and that became his M.O. Every new film arrived with the expectation that he was going to pull something over on you.

Signs brought me back. Its final reveal was small in detail but enormous in what it meant for the story. Some would call it a plot hole. For me, the movie was genuinely unnerving, frightening, and scary in a way I hadn’t felt from Spielberg since Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It revived that hope that there was something special in Shyamalan’s eye.

Then The Village lost me.

That ending felt so try-hard, so desperate to deliver another twist, that it left me cold. I started wondering whether Shyamalan was a one-trick pony and got off the bandwagon. The god-awful in 2006 and the laughably bad in 2008 only pushed me further away.