Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is a psychologist who has just earned an award from the mayor for his efforts with children. On the night that Crowe and his wife, Anna , are celebrating his triumph, they arrive home to find an intruder in their bathroom. He is Vincent Gray , one of Crowe’s few failures.
After rambling about Crowe’s faults as a psychiatrist and asking ’’Do you know why you’re afraid when you’re alone?’’, he brandishes a gun, then shoots himself and his doctor. Cut to ’’Next Fall.’’ Crowe has recovered from his wounds physically but not emotionally. A gulf has developed between him and his wife. The once-loving couple hardly talks and he suspects that she’s having an affair. As a means to assuage his guilt, Crowe begins to work with 9-year old Cole Sear , a boy who shows similar problems to those displayed by Vincent Gray at that age. Crowe is determined to accomplish for Cole what he could not do for his former patient. But the task he has set for himself is not an easy one. Cole sees and hears things that others cannot, and he is afraid to open up to his mother, for fear that she will think he’s a freak.
Cole’s problem is that he sees ghosts, or more precisely, ’’dead people’’. These are not people who have died peacefully, but gruesomely. There is a young boy who has been shot in the back of his head, and a particularly angry housewife with slit wrists. Needless to say, Cole is frightened, especially when some of these spirits can inflict wounds on him.
His worried mother is at a loss. Only Crowe can get through to him, but even he is sceptical when Cole reveals his secret. As he slowly learns the truth, Crowe encourages Cole to approach the ghosts, and see what they want. Meanwhile, Crowe’s domestic life grows worse, with his wife not talking to him and even seeing another man.
The Sixth Sense makes up for a slow-paced first hour with some genuinely scary scenes during the second. While there are a few, make-you-jump moments, the most shocking is not a traditional scare scene at all. It occurs during the interlude at a dead girl’s funeral, when the truth of how the girl died is shown by a videotape, and leaves you feeling uneasy. At last Malcolm himself learns that he had died on the same night when the gun had been fired by vincent gray....but still he believed that he was alive as he was able to speak with haley joel oesment.....the end is terrific when joel reveals that HE CAN SEE GHOSTS AND THEY DONT EVEN NOW THAT THEY ARE DEAD...this makes Malcolm think and know about the truth...........
Willis turns in one of his most subdued performances. He can utter smug one-liners with the best of them in films like Die Hard and The Fifth Element, but here he plays second fiddle to young Osment. Osment is astonishing - we feel his pain and his fear, especially his inabilty to tell anyone of his secret lest they think him a freak. His is one of the more believable child performances in the past year.
Sixth Sense is one of the few horror films in the last two decades that doesn’t resort to gore and violence to deliver thrills and chills. Indeed, it proves that what’s implied is more frightening than what’s shown. While not perfect, it provides a satisfying and solid two hours of entertainment