The Sixth Sense - DVD Movie Review

"The Sixth Sense" (TSS) is a "scary" movie - so they say. To be honest, TSS didn't scare me much, though there are some scenes where the element of surprise certainly drives electricity. So, make sure you do NOT let people tell you many TSS details, or you'll risk an otherwise fine piece-of-Cinema.

TSS faced strong rivals, when first launched: those were the days of "Blair Witch Project" (BWP - soon to be DiVX reviewed) and "The Haunting", who was doing great for weekend sales. Fortunately for the TSS producers - was it a sixth sense? - the movie's argument was / is on the psych side, and NOT on regular horror BDS grounds: Blood, Dark and Screams :).

It is "The Sixth Sense" difference that makes it interesting. But what difference?! How can a title star Bruce Willis and (still) be different?! Calm down. Actors do get too familiar with some roles, and in the Bruce Willis case, we've had enough of his Urban Rambo acting, but so did Bruce himself...

This time Bruce Willis is Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist, who spends the whole film trying to fix a deadly mistake he made, on the beginning of his carrier, when he didn't understand one of his pacients...

Years after, Malcolm finally gets an equivalent case, on the person of Cole Sear (Haley Osment), an eight year-old boy, who is the exact opposite of Bart Simpson - he couldn't turn more inside of himself, and his mother can't understand the emotional and physical problems he shows.

Malcolm distantly follows Cole... but they'll slowly become friends, who will trust each other their most personal fears. Cole will confess he "sees dead people"; and Malcolm will admit "he once knew someone he didn't help at all"...

I can't write more about TSS - if I did you wouldn't appreciate the film, as much as you could. What I am telling you is just what the trailer shows... One man. One boy. The man wants the boy to open up, and the boy wants to know if the man will believe his "secret", if he does expand the truth.

TSS runs s-l-o-w-l-y all the time, until the last 10 minutes, or something like that. Suddenly, you'll be very - VERY - surprised. Such a surprise is worth the previous next-to-nothing 90 minutes. But don't get me wrong: those "next-to-nothing" minutes are extremely well written and directed, with the sole purpose of relaxing you, in order to deliver some punctual scary situations and build an effective ground for the already stated big surprise.

To be blunt, "The Sixth Sense" features two actings (Willis' and Osment's), a good story (that goes better in a book), punctual light frights, and a single big shock that justifies it all.

Instead of managing to be a "horror" movie, TSS relaxes me, because of its slow pace and easy / crisp dialogues. I enjoyed it a lot.

The DVD edition I bought (Region 2) has plenty of extra material, including a nice documentary about the sound track: (again) I was surprised, learning that many sounds are heard like instruments, are just manipulations of human voices (on chorus)...

Great picture quality (and the more-than-just-occasional digital black is not an easy task) and great audio, including obvious surround information (and that's not easy on such a calm story), sums up to the cocktail and makes me sign a sincere recommendation.