Let me tell you something that is true: I love M. Night Shyamalan. This isn’t the trepiditious love like one may have for Oatmeal Cream Pies or the Black Eyed Peas. This is full on agape love.

Let me tell you something else that is true: In terms of quantifiable suckitude, M. Night Shyamalan’s movies have been growing exponentially suckier. No one can really definitively explain this, but if you’ve ever read The Man Who Heard Voices, you could hypothesize that his ego simply will not allow him to self-edit or criticize.

Now let me tell you something that may not be true:
In a great many ways, Shyamalan’s cinematic demise parallels the average faith journey of a Christian.
Said another way, starting at The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan’s movies mirror the Christian’s faith journey that starts at the salvation experience. Let me explain.

The Sixth Sense
This was Shyamalan’s game-changing foray into the movie game that also resurrected Bruce Willis’ career. It reset the horror thriller genre in Hollywood and said to filmmakers, “Hey, it’s ok if your movies are more smart than splatter.”

So how does this relate to my faith?
It’s like this: when you accept salvation, it’s the spiritual high that carries you for days, weeks, months, or even years. It’s this rush of emotional and spiritual momentum and this is the high water mark for many people because it’s a glimpse of faith without the burden of guilt and regret. Essentially, this experience refreshes you and changes the lens in which you see the world.

Relating this back, The Sixth Sense was the high point of Shyamalan’s career and he’s still coasting from the credibility derived from it. It was THAT good.*

Unbreakable
Unbreakable was underappreciated at the box office but critically acclaimed and fan-popular nonetheless. It’s underrated in a similar way that Cheerwine or Jason Segal is. Maybe you weren’t totally sure about it on the front end, but once encountered, the quality becomes abundantly clear.

It was such a good follow up to The Sixth Sense because it was understated with a deft touch of the principle behind the story. Essentially, it was a super hero origin story told without the scourges of Kirsten Dunst and Dopey Maguire ruining it.

So how does this relate to my faith?
Unbreakable is representative of the period after the luster of the salvation experience wears off. It’s a time of more muted development where discipleship and other essential formative elements congeal to create the foundation of your faith.

Unbreakable wasn’t as sensational as The Sixth Sense was, but it was still extremely well done and clever. In this sense, it added to Shyamalan’s reputation as a filmmaker in how his movies weren’t all about twists or the visual affect of gore.

Signs
For Shyamalan, Signs represents a point where pop culture relevance, critical anticipation, and casting choices intersect. And the movie didn’t really disappoint. It may have it’s detractors, but all in all, it was a very solid movie.

It combined all the elements that made his first two movies good and this is a much more difficult notion than you might think. Balancing the expectations with the actual execution is infinitely more difficult than we give directors credit for.

So how does this relate to my faith?
Just as Signs was a point of confluence for Shyamalan, this point in the Christian’s faith journey also represents a similar point of convergence, which is when your convictions are lined up with your understanding and the idea of your faith actual goes into practice. It’s no longer a concept to you, but rather it’s a method you live by.

This is a really good place because it’s too early for bitterness but at the same time you can still implement the elements of your faith that you’ve slowly developed. It’s a plateau of sorts that symbolizes peak of the faith experience.

The Village

For Shyamalan, all subsequent projects after Signs were met with disappointment. The Village kicked this perceptual plunge off as it was not well-received by critics and fans alike. The idea prompting the movie seemed intriguing and elementally it appeared to be very closely related to previous Shyamalan movies, but on a molecular level, something just seemed…off. 

So how does this relate to my faith?
If Signs represents the plateau of your faith, The Village represents the point when your proverbial wagon begins tipping southward. Usually, it isn’t anything drastic that occurs. It’s just a very gradual shifting of intentions. Your faith is no longer the priority as it gets shouldered out by other things that vie for your focus.

Lady In The Water
When Lady in The Water came out, I remember psyching myself up for it. The hope was that it would be Shyamalan’s return to his roots as this was a story he originally crafted for his daughters. What could be more natural and pure than that? But yet it still tanked. Mainly, this was because everything was out of sorts. Not only was the essential story awful and contrived, but the execution was bad too. And Paul Giamatti’s big creepy eyes didn’t help things either.

So how does this relate to my faith?
As you get further and further away from the fundamentals of your faith, things begin to seem discombobulated. You know what you want (to be faithful and good) but the evolution of your priorities is such that you are unable to sort things out. The effort and desire may be there, but unless you change that which vexes you, you’ll never get where you want to be.

The Happening

The Happening or as I like to call it, “The Crappening”** was Shyamalan’s worst effort to date. It was rife with plot holes and every problem was exacerbated by the worst collection of actors in the history of casting.

Mark Walberg is difficult to take serious, Zooey Deschannel is morose and unlikable and John Leguizamo is John Leguizamo. To be clear, if John Leguizamo is in your movie and it isn’t animated, you might as well chain it to a fortress of suckitude. He is far away the foremost slayer of movies today.*** He’s a Dexter-esque prodigy of movie killing, except exponentially more unlikable.

But beyond the casting, the biggest issue with the movie is how it simply sucks. Al Pacino in his prime wouldn’t have helped this movie because the soul of the movie was made up of crap, lint, and hot dog water. 

So how does this relate to my faith?
We all reach a point of rock bottom in regards to our faith. It’s beyond just going through the motions. At this point, it’s a dissociation of all things prior that made your faith what it was combined with a lack of effort to reclaim your former self.

This works to distance yourself from God and the collateral damage of this is evident in your spirit.

Similarly, for The Happening, Shyamalan distanced himself from the formula of his earlier success: Great casting, subtle eccentricity of the plot, and principled story-telling. Deviating from these fundamentals cause him to create a dumpster-fire of a movie, and this application is the same for our faith development. When you abandon the fundamentals of your faith, it also evolves into a similar kind of dumpster-fire. (And the bad kind of dumpster too, with diapers, human hair, and rotten chinese food.)

Next week, Shyamalan’s movie Devil comes out and we can only hope for his sake (and for the sake of this extended metaphor) that it will lead to a rebound at the box office. In theory, he’ll eventually have to buck this trend of decline, but I’m not going to lie, after watching the trailer, Devil doesn’t seem like the one to do it.

What about you? What Shyamalan movies did you love or hate?

Footnotes
* It’s true. It was.
**I would have also accepted The Nappening
***Second place? LL Cool J.