Movies Can Be Both Silly And Twisty (& M. Night Shyamalan Is The Master)

Old director M. Night Shyamalan’s twists may be silly, but that doesn’t mean the endings of The Happening or The Village aren’t effective either.

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Director M. Night Shyamalan may be known for his sometimes great, sometimes terrible twists, but even divisive movies like The Happening or The Village all prove silly twists can improve a movie if used correctly. M. Night Shyamalan’s love of twists has been evident since the helmer’s first major hit, The Sixth Sense. This horror movie is still ranked as Shyamalan’s best by many fans of the divisive helmer, and its reveal is a rare example of a bombshell revelation that re-contextualizes everything viewers have seen, but still makes sense within the story’s established reality.

However, in the years since The Sixth Sense debuted, Shyamalan’s later attempts at clever last-minute revelations have been a mixed bag at best. Some of the helmer’s movies have featured no earth-shattering twists to speak of, like 2009’s The Last Airbender, and have nonetheless been some of his least-liked outings. Others, like 2008’s The Happening, featured a major reveal that reshaped the entire plot – and their twists were considered the worst part by many viewers.

What the ups and downs of Shyamalan’s screen history prove is that even truly silly twists can work, depending on how they are handled. Turning the Terminator into a suburban stepdad, for example, was a twist that works in the context of a comedy sketch, but not when it inexplicably cropped up in 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate and was treated with total seriousness. Often, the issue is less with the twist and more with the tone of the project it appears in, as well as the thematic purpose of the reveal itself. Part of why the Terminator example doesn’t work is because its point (that Terminators can be people too) is not one the sequel focuses on or illustrates elsewhere, making the revelation somewhat pointless. However, even Shyamalan’s most absurd twists do fit their movies, as proven by a look back on The Happening, Signs, and The Village’s big reveals.

A Silly Twist Can Change A Movie’s Appeal

In its opening stretch, The Happening is a sometimes creepy horror movie whose scenes of mass suicide are striking and scary. By the denouement, The Happening is a hilariously bad attempt at eco-horror whose utter self-seriousness makes it impossible to take seriously – but equally impossible to not enjoy either. The revelation that plants are causing people to kill themselves as an act of revenge for a human-caused climate catastrophe is an inherently absurd one, and the movie switches gears into being a more goofy sort of horror when the reality of what is happening becomes clear.

It is a canny tonal choice for the filmmakers to accept that the bizarre nature of the twist makes this sillier tone necessary, and one that turns it from a passable horror mystery into an uproarious satire (as evidenced by the killer elderly woman encountered near the climax). The Happening switches gear – intentionally or otherwise – from a straight-faced horror into a Mystery Science Theatre 3000-worthy effort, but the viewing experience is just as fun. Although the twist changes the movie’s appeal, it is still one worth watching, where a more frustrating or less inventive twist would simply have made it forgettable or bland.

Silly Twists Can Save Middling Movies

It is almost sacrilege among people disappointed by The Village to suggest the twist is the best thing about it, but viewers tend to forget that without its absurd-yet-somehow-predictable ending, it would just be a lesser horror period piece. As far as period horror movies go, The Village is at first an enigmatic but slow-moving effort without the incredible detail of The Witch or the brisk pace and subversive twists of Fear Street 1666. In this context, The Village seems to be a squarely middle-of-the-road effort, but its bonkers last-minute reveal elevates it into a clever satire of the self-defeating desire to bring back an imagined past.

The imperfect period detail suddenly makes sense as foreshadowing, and the ordeal of the protagonists is reframed in this context as a generational trauma faced by young people who want progress but can’t escape the suffocating influence of the past. To quote Josh Lewis of Sleazoids podcast, The Village ends up being “an achingly sad movie about the dangers of collectively denying the reality of tragedy and suffering and constructing a deceptive mythology of public misinformation for a presumed greater good,” and its supposedly silly twist is instrumental in the success of this parable. The social commentary may not be as cut-and-dried as the satire of Stephen King’s similarly intergenerational Children of the Corn, but it is a compelling and surprisingly prescient story of post-9/11 angst resulting in a community retreating into imagined history for collective comfort – and the human cost of this folly. If the blackly comic, yet genuinely sad, revelation came at the end of a Twilight Zone or Tales From the Crypt outing, viewers would likely have been less dismissive of its satirical point.

Silly Twists Can Still Work As Twists

The ending of Signs is a classic case of a twist being silly, but no less effective for it. The revelation that the aliens are allergic to water is nonsensical on its face – the planet they are invading is 70% water-covered, meaning the odds of them even surviving their landing was a 1-in-3 chance. However, few would say the twist of the classic HG Wells novel (and one of Steven Spielberg’s best sci-fi movies) War of the Worlds ruined that story, and the revelation the invaders can be felled by the common cold is no less anti-climatic than Signs’ ending.

Both movies work because their plots center around a small family, meaning the weakness of the aliens provides a comically simple “the rest of the world was alright” deus ex machina once the self-contained ordeal of the protagonists has ended. Compared to, say, Shyamalan’s The Visit (whose twist is less silly, more grounded, and nowhere near as fun), Signs is a case of a silly twist improving a movie, making the austere story fun precisely because it is outlandish. A more conventional twist can be predictable or a letdown where Signs ratchets up the tension and alleviates it with a silly payoff. It is further proof that Old director M. Night Shyamalan’s twists can be effective, provided viewers arrive with the right expectations.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/m-night-shyamalan-movies-silly-twists-good-why/