Essay Database

With obvious gifts for directing children, creating atmospheric stories, and working honestly with deeply felt themes about the role of the dead in our lives, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has followed up last year's touching Wide Awake with an even better film about a boy in the grip of loss and fear. Bruce Willis stars as child psychologist Malcolm Crowe, who is shot by a former patient who claims Crowe did nothing to alleviate his …

…with their voices and expressions. Such discipline also keeps our attention on what is, in fact, a good yarn about characters ill-prepared for reasons of youth or circumstance to face their destinies. Toward that end, Osment and Willis could not be better in roles whose full meaning isn't entirely revealed until the final resolution. Chalk this film up as an unusually intelligent thriller about that which scares us the most: accepting our accidents of fate.