The Best M. Night Shyamalan Movies, Definitively Ranked

This story contains spoilers for the best M. Night Shyamalan movies.

What a difference a decade can make. Ten years ago this fall, one-time Spielberg heir apparent M. Night Shyamalan seemed like he had been downgraded to his last chance, coming off a string of four or five movies so ill-regarded that it didn’t even seem to matter that many of them were technically box office hits. Then his found-footage thriller The Visit became a genuine (and low-cost) word-of-mouth success, eventually becoming a bona fide critical fave, at least in certain corners, and launching M. Night 2.0. As such, the Mahé, India-born, Pennsylvania-raised, Philadelphia-loyal writer-director has become a poster boy for the niche-ification of cinema over the past ten years. To the general public, Shyamalan is probably still best-known as the Sixth Sense guy who outstayed his welcome with one too many plot twists; to certain film nerds, on the other hand, he’s an idiosyncratic craftsman whose movies are immediately recognizable statements that happen to be made in a genre idiom. It’s gotten to the point where Shyamalan’s mainstream and arthouse bona fides can be displayed together in a lofty Lincoln Center retrospective, running now through early September in Manhattan, pairing most of his movies in double features with Night-selected films ranging from midcentury genre landmarks (The Blob; The Haunting; Planet of the Apes) to canonized classics (Pulp Fiction; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) to vintage art-house staples (The Exterminating Angel). Yes, The Happening is included.

These images of the filmmaker as populist, B-movie maestro, and oddball auteur can occupy the same space because honestly, Shyamalan’s massive mainstream hits are not that different from his stranger, more seemingly niche-driven projects. He often employs a hushed tone, punctuated with cornball and/or deadpan comic moments, in stories of the supernatural, the uncanny, and, yes, sometimes the last-minute revelation (though less often than his reputation would suggest). Regardless of scale or subject matter, most of his movies unabashedly aim straight for a wide mainstream audience, like Spielberg’s or Hitchcock’s; they’re also too specific in their style to be easily mistaken for anyone else, like, well, see above. (One major difference: Spielberg and Hitchcock have far more direct imitators than Shyamalan, presumably because those copies are easier to pull off, at least superficially.)

That’s not to say, however, that all of his movies are created more or less equal. The best M. Night Shyamalan movies feel like you’re tuning into a secret parallel world, familiar enough to resonate but too stylized to feel precisely like reality as we know it. (Almost like some kind of… Twilight Zone?!) The worst ones succumb to writerly contrivance or awkwardly gamed-out presumptions about what the filmmaker thinks the audience wants or needs from him. Still, the more you watch Shyamalan’s films, the more even the lesser ones reveal themselves as work too interestingly strange to dismiss. (Well, except for a handful of genuine failures.) For your reference, here’s how his 16 features so far rank out.

16. Praying with Anger (1992)

This may not technically be Shyamalan’s worst movie; if nothing else, it feels more personal than his bungled adaptation of a beloved Nickelodeon TV show. It damn well should feel that way; Shyamalan wrote and directed but also stars in this indie that never received a commercial release, playing a young man who returns to India after years in the United States, to reconnect with his remaining family and mourn his departed father. In another world, this might have been a fine companion piece to Mira Nair’s similarly cross-cultural Mississippi Masala, released around the same time. Shyamalan, however, is not precisely on the level of Denzel Washington. Moreover, Praying with Anger only really played festivals and still isn’t available to watch commercially even if you wanted to; the best you can do is an archived stream of what looks like a copy of a copy of an old DVD. If you do click play, it may enhance your appreciation of Shyamalan’s subsequent work as a low-key character actor, at least compared to his morose leading-man turn here. Fans may well find it easy to picture Shyamalan returning to non-thriller, non-supernatural projects at some point and shooting them with his customary flair. But this, as the kids used to say, ain’t it.

15. The Last Airbender (2010)