GOOD IN EVERY SENSE

...It's the task of child shrink Malcolm Crowe to divine that secret...

...That touch alone is indicative of the delicacy and sophistication that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan brings to The Sixth Sense...

...And it would be easy to overlook the subtle and touching work by Willis, who disappears inside his character so totally that you forget you're watching the preening star of Armageddon and Die Hard...

...This is not some neo-realist kid who is natural and unaffected on screen, like most other great child-acting stunts...

...midst of a career crisis and haunted as he is by that failure and his unjust punishment, Malcolm is in a unique position to come to grips with the fact that his new patient is quite literally haunted...

...As anyone who has seen the film's newspaper ads knows, Malcolm finally gets Cole to tell him and the audience his secret: "I see dead people," the boy says...

...This is a performance by a professional so expert and nuanced that Laurence Olivier would have envied him...

...While The Sixth Sense does deal with the supernatural, it could be the story of any extraordinary child emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the insight and knowledge of the world his giant intellect remorselessly provides, and whose flashes of freaky genius make him a mystery to his peers and an inscrutable burden to his elders...

...The movie itself offers an example of how unsettling that kind of genius can be in the person of Haley Joel Osment, who plays Cole and gives what I believe is the greatest performance by a child actor ever captured on celluloid...

...Malcolm is in trouble too...

...His father has run off with another woman, leaving his valiant mother (Toni Collette) to struggle on her own in South Philly with two jobs and a son who is being eaten alive by a secret he's too afraid to tell her...

...GOOD IN EVERY SENSE The surprising excellence of The Sixth Sense By John Podhoretz The most striking recent evidence that mystical and supernatural forces may be at play in America is this: The best movie of the year is a horror flick starring Bruce Willis as a psychiatrist...

...The Sixth Sense unfolds itself with quiet and dogged persistence...

...Once a sanctimonious success and the toast of the town, he is coping with a marriage that began to crumble after a former patient broke into his house, screamed "You failed me...

...Add to that the fact that Willis's co-star is an eleven-year-old boy whose most notable previous credits were playing Murphy Brown's illegitimate son and the child of Forrest Gump, and you would have every reason to avoid The Sixth Sense...

...The ghosts want something from Cole, but he's too young to know what it is, and in their frustration they occasionally do Cole physical harm...

...The aptly named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) is a troubled boy who is bearing the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders...

...and shot Malcolm in the gut before killing himself...

...But The Sixth Sense is, in fact, a masterpiece—original, spooky, funny, literate, thought-provoking, and profoundly moving...

...It's up to Malcolm to help the boy figure out how to cope with his uncanny second sight, because if he doesn't Cole will end up like the patient who shot Malcolm and brought his idyllic married life to an end...

...It takes its own sweet time, and even seemingly throw-away scenes (like one with Shyamalan as an emergency-room doctor having to tell Cole's mother she's under suspicion of child abuse) are both beautifully conceived and necessary to the plot...

...The Sixth Sense is an answer to their prayer...

...It even makes Philadelphia look good...

...The ghosts Cole sees don't know they're ghosts, but they do know they're angry and dissatisfied, and aside from the church there's no place he can hide...

...It possesses a quality almost entirely absent from recent American movies: It's in the best possible taste...

...All the time...

...Malcolm first meets Cole in the pews of the boy's parish church, where Cole goes to find sanctuary from his troubles...

...On paper, nothing could sound less promising, especially if you were one of the few unfortunates who paid cash money to see Willis's last performance as a psychiatrist in a hilariously rotten piece of soft-core porn called The Color of Night...

...Moviegoers often echo young Cole in crying out to the Lord for something, anything, worthwhile to see...

...Ominously, Cole speaks a phrase in Latin unknown to Malcolm, who goes to the dictionary and discovers it is the de profundis—the first words to Psalm 130: Out of the depths I cry unto you, O Lord...

...After he speaks those words, we begin to see what Cole sees, and the sights are frightening and tragic, like a teenage boy who eagerly says he wants to show Cole where his dad keeps his guns...

...In the A contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz is associate editor and editorial-page editor of the NEW YORK POST...

...When the boy turns away, the camera reveals that his skull has been half-shattered by a bullet...

...Born in India and raised in Philadelphia, Shyamalan is all of twenty-nine years old, and he proves himself a natural-born storyteller...

...As his mother, the Australian actress Toni Collette is smashing as well...