A list with a twist: Every M. Night Shyamalan film ranked

How did he screw this up?! Since Avatar: The Last Airbender premiered on TV in 2005, it has been hailed as one of the best family shows ever, rich in emotional depth and with a lavish visual style. In his big-screen redo, Shyamalan squandered all of that potential, creating an unwatchable amalgam of his most glaring weaknesses. Stilted dialogue, murky cinematography and plasticine performances are the defining traits of this dud—and let’s not even talk about that penis hairdo. Off the back of the similarly dreadful The Lady In The Water and The Happening, The Last Airbender temporarily rendered Shyamalan a cinematic pariah.

More the brainchild of star and producer Will Smith than of Shyamalan, After Earth was another failed attempt by Smith to make his son, Jaden, a bona fide box office draw. Like that Karate Kid remake before it, After Earth flopped—and much more spectacularly. This story of a trainee soldier battling the wilds of a post-apocalyptic Earth to save his war hero dad was always going to live and die by the Smiths’ chemistry, yet on screen they share none. The choice to downplay Will’s natural charisma only makes us scratch our heads even harder.

Saying that The Sixth Sense was Shyamalan’s directorial debut will definitely get you kicked out of movie trivia night. The Miramax-distributed dramedy, Wide Awake, was actually his first feature film (not counting 1992’s Praying With Anger, which he made while still at student at NYU). Although the writer/director would do great things immediately afterwards, Wide Awake is a tonally incoherent coming-of-age tale, torn between Disney-esque whimsy and ponderings on cancer and the existence of God. As his career progressed, Shyamalan had issues aligning his vision with the goals of studio bigwigs—hence disasters like The Lady In The Water—and this early effort is evidence of that.

Based on the acclaimed graphic novel Sandcastle, Old has one hell of a setup: vacationers converge on a gorgeous, sandy beach and find themselves rapidly aging for no apparent reason. It could easily have led to a tasty payoff, but all we got was anti-capitalist moralizing of the kind that Hollywood’s been churning out since the counterculture ’60s. Shyamalan, despite being in the middle of his post-The Visit renaissance, also lapses into the types of stilted dialogue and clumsy characterizations that marked After Earth and The Last Airbender. What a waste of a promising premise.

After Signs proved controversial with its “love it or hate it” twist and occasional wooden performance, The Village continued Shyamalan’s downward spiral by being his first totally bad film. The story of an isolated 19th-century village surrounded by monsters, its twist is somehow both predictable and devoid of logic. However, this isn’t a Happening-level misfire, either. Certain scenes are oozing with tension and dread, and Joaquin Phoenix excels with another powerhouse performance. Never reaching the brilliance of The Sixth Sense nor the ridiculousness of what’s to come, The Village is your run-of-the-mill, subpar thriller.

After Split revealed itself as a clever, backdoor follow-up to Unbreakable, Glass became the kind of crossover that The Avengers made de rigueur in the superhero universe. The opening half, anchored by Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, and Bruce Willis’ performances, is packed with promise as it posits that the superpowered aren’t gifted but are instead mentally ill. However, the series of reveals that follow both diminishes the horror of certain characters and undoes the logic of what’s come before. It could have been great, but it couldn’t stick the landing.

Signs and The Village were downgrades from the mastery Shyamalan demonstrated at his peak, but The Lady In The Water is so insane that it actually becomes a fascinating window into the mind of a genius gone mad. In a rampage of ego, the writer/director/actor casts himself as a prophet destined for martyrdom, while a film critic gets mauled by a wolf. Knowing that this fantasy story of “narfs” and “scrunts” is based on a bedtime tale he invented makes us pity his kids, and the fact that he squandered much of the budget to build an apartment complex in Philadelphia is just … what the hell, man?

Objectively, you could argue that this “horror” is Shyamalan’s worst film. The acting is atrocious, the twist is spoiled midway through and it relies on its audience being terrified of trees. However—unlike, say, The Last Airbender— these errors push The Happening directly into so-bad-it’s-brilliant territory. How can you not laugh at notorious bad boy Mark Wahlberg being the world’s most pathetic science teacher and calling for a truce with a potted plant? Or at Zooey Deschanel gazing at everything she sees with confused eyes and jaw agape? Unintentionally, this is one of the funniest comedies you’ll ever see.

Like its immediate predecessor Old, Knock At The Cabin is an adaptation with one hell of an elevator pitch: a gang of four shows up at a remote shack to tell a young family that, unless they kill one of their own, the world will end. It begins as a tense, claustrophobic thriller, chillingly contrasting hideous deeds with the civility of the people committing them. However, the big reveal is a bit weak. While a masterful swerve like The Sixth Sense’s factors in all the clues the film planted along the way, Knock… instead relies on its audience forgetting basic information for its plot to make sense.

While there’s a general consensus regarding where most Shyamalan flicks fall in terms of quality, Signs remains his most controversial endeavor. To be fair, there’s plenty to like: Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix deftly star in an alien invasion film that leaves its audience in the dark as to the nature of the extraterrestrials, grounding everything in a refreshing realism. However, there’s Rory Culkin’s robotic dialogue to contend with, as well as a twist that makes the baddies from above seem like some of the dumbest villains ever put to film. Whether you love it or loathe it, there’s a strong argument for where you stand.

After his commercial and critical disappointments of … well, the last decade, Shyamalan had to finance The Visit himself, taking out a $5 million loan for this passion project. The break from big-budget blockbusters turned out to be exactly what he needed. This found-footage horror sees the auteur returning to his roots, injecting fresh but simple twists into a well-worn genre. The lead child actors, Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould, often outshine the adults, the absence of a score keeps the tension organic, and the ending reveal is masterfully done. This is the best Shyamalan had been in almost 15 years, reminding everybody why he was so damn lauded to begin with.

Only two months after The Visit shocked the masses by actually being decent, Shyamalan kept the ball rolling by starting production on Split. Despite being another low-budget affair, made for just $9 million, it was buoyed at the box office by terrific turns from James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy. The former stars as a psychopath with 24 personalities and, as he runs the gamut from caring matron to superhuman cannibal, remains terrifying. The end reveal of this being a surprise Unbreakable sequel also works wondrously, again exhibiting Shyamalan at his mind-bending best.

Post-Batman & Robin and pre-Spider-Man, the superhero film was box office poison. Yet, by grounding superpowers in the real world and weaving a meta-commentary on the obsessions of comic book fans, Shyamalan was able to make Unbreakable a rare exception to the rule. Gone are the spandex and theatrics, replaced by the simple story of David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who somehow survives a train crash and tries to figure out why. Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the frail Elijah Price, share harmonious chemistry, before the twist weaves together everything.

Countless superlatives have been thrown at The Sixth Sense, from “best ghost story ever” to “best thriller ever” and even, simply, “best film ever.” Whether or not you believe it deserves such praise, we can all be united by one thing: that twist is iconic. Throughout its running time, Shyamalan’s magnum opus plants pieces of a puzzle you can’t even see being assembled. The film masquerades as the story of a child embracing his gift of seeing ghosts until it reaches what seems to be its emotional climax and then all is revealed. It’s so good that you need to watch it again to see all the clues you missed, hence that hefty $672 million box office take. The Sixth Sense inspired a myriad of imitators and launched Shyamalan’s career, yet nothing that came in its wake—not even by its mastermind—could outdo it.