If you're like me, dear readers, you're of two minds about M. Night Shyamalan the filmmaker. The unnatural dialogue he writes is clearly a stylistic choice, but that doesn't make it any less clunky to listen to. His use of genre tropes (be it sci-fi, fantasy, or horror) to explore themes about the human condition and spirituality is audacious, yet he can't stop chasing the high of "The Sixth Sense," the result of which is he keeps making movies where the big twists and reveals fall flat. Then there's his formalist visual style, which at times is fantastic, while at other times it can be overly distracting or muddle the meaning of what Shyamalan is trying to convey.
We could go on (like his continued misuse of mental illness as a plot device), but you get the idea. At the same time, he's someone who invests so much of himself in his art, even pouring his own money into making them. You can see it when he talks about his films, too, like his take on what the nod to "The Missouri Breaks" signifies in "Old:"
"For me it represents this thing that someone's holding onto for their sanity. Everyone must know, these are the two greatest actors of all time, why doesn't anybody know this? And so they can't understand this but they're holding onto it... It was just a kind of funny, sad, beautiful thing about my dad and cinema."
Then there's the way Shymalan refuses to join a current franchise while forgoing movies based on "safe," well-known IPs in favor of making either original, riskier, low-to-mid-budget thrillers or, in the case of "Old," a film based on relatively obscure source material. It's what keeps me coming back to his work, time and time again, enough so I can say there's a part of me that loves all his movies, no matter how the final product turns out.
Rest assured, when his next movie, "Knock at the Cabin," arrives, I will be ready to get hurt again.