#89 ‘The Sixth Sense’

Ghosts, Guilt, and the Tragedy of Women Who Must Die So Men Can Feel Feelings

The Sixth Sense (1999) is M. Night Shyamalan’s genre-defining ghost story wrapped in a meditation on grief, wrapped again in a twist so famous it should have its own SAG card. It’s elegant, eerie, and perfectly structured—a slow-burn horror about dead people, yes, but mostly about emotionally constipated men who can only confront their trauma through spectral intermediaries.

Bruce Willis plays Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who spends the entire film with the blank affect of a man who thinks whispering counts as emotional depth. He’s trying to help Cole (Haley Joel Osment, in a performance that single-handedly made the phrase “I see dead people” into a millennial party trick), a terrified boy haunted by ghosts who, unlike most men in this film, actually express their feelings—even if it’s through blue-filtered panic and tiny, trembling lips.

Cole is a fascinating character: traumatized, intuitive, and more emotionally literate than the adults around him. He’s what happens when a child absorbs everyone else’s pain and has no safe outlet—basically every woman in a family drama, but in OshKosh overalls. And while the film treats his condition with empathy, it also implies that the only way to heal is by helping dead people find closure. You know—because nothing teaches healthy boundaries like being the grief counselor for a parade of murdered adults.

And the ghosts? Almost all of them are women and children. And almost all of them are victims. Poisoned daughters. Abused wives. Forgotten mothers. Their suffering exists to be uncovered, explained, and—most importantly—witnessed by men. The afterlife in The Sixth Sense is less a metaphysical realm than a holding pen for women whose stories were never heard until a sensitive boy and a dead therapist show up to validate them.

Let’s talk about Malcolm’s wife (Olivia Williams), who spends the entire film in a slow-motion trance of sadness. We’re meant to read this as marital grief, but in retrospect (spoiler alert), it’s just widowhood played for narrative sleight of hand. Her job is to cry, look haunted, and never question why her husband no longer speaks to her—because apparently, being married to an emotionally unavailable man prepares you for being married to an actually unavailable one.

Shyamalan directs with restraint, allowing silence and stillness to carry dread better than any jump scare. The muted palette, the careful framing, the unassuming camera work—it’s all masterful. And the twist? Still holds up. But the real surprise isn’t that Malcolm’s dead. It’s that a film about pain, grief, and visibility still can’t quite see its women as more than vessels for someone else’s growth.

4 out of 5 cold spots in the hallway
(One for Osment’s haunting vulnerability. One for Shyamalan’s controlled direction. One for the genuinely shattering twist. One for the film’s atmosphere of restrained terror. The missing star? Buried with the dozens of female ghosts who never got a name, a voice, or a second act beyond inspiring emotional breakthroughs in the living men who failed them.)