If the title didn’t make it clear yet, the following post will spoil the ending of a lot of M. Night Shyamalan films.
When you watch an M. Night Shyamalan film, you know that not everything is as it seems. Not all of his films end with narrative-destroying twists, but most do, and his most iconic third act reveals that they have changed films, and the way we think about them, forever. Because we love Shyamalan films, because we love a good twist, and because we love ranking things, we decided to rank every Shyamalan twist, from The sixth Sense and beyond.
Now, this isn’t a ranking of all of Shyamalan’s films, as not all of them have what you’d call a twist. His early films Praying with Anger It is Wide awake are not torsion-based. After Earththe sci-fi film starring Will and Jaden Smith as human refugees from the distant future on an inhospitable version of our planet, is just a straightforward adventure. And the only twist in The last Airbender was that the movie was terrible. But every other movie, starting with his most iconic film and up to the present, has featured some kind of climactic revelation that changes everything for the characters.
This is also not a rating of the quality of the films, as ScreenCrush already has one of these. Instead, we ranked twists based on impact and sheer cleverness, tracking how much of the story they change and whether they change it in a satisfying way. Not every twist is satisfying, or cool, or even necessary, while others are so iconic that quotes appear on T-shirts and mugs. We took all of that into consideration when putting together this list — and even threw in a twist of our own at the end.
M. Night Shyamalan Twists, Ranked
From The Sixth Sense onwards, we’ve ranked every M. Night Shyamalan twist from worst to best.
Gallery credit: Emma Stefansky
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