M. Night Shyamalan Directed Movies Ranked
12. Lady In the Water (2006)
Coming across as the work of a very angry man shouting into the wind, Lady In the Water was filled with dialogue so on the nose regarding M. Night Shyamalan’s own issues with film critics, producers and studios that it felt almost fourth wall breaking; and not in a good way.
In being defensive of mixed reviews to his previous release The Village, Shyamalan isolated himself from critics, viciously undermining and then murdering one in the Lady In the Water screenplay, then going on to cast himself as the film’s prophet in some kind of ritualistic act of self-appreciation nobody but the man himself could fathom. The movie also didn’t come across like it knew what it wanted to be.
Shyamalan confessed that inspiration for the film came from bedtime tales he’d tell his children, and the casting of Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of Splash director Ron Howard) as a mermaid stuck in an apartment complex’s swimming pool, seemed to indicate that the film was intended to be a spooky family tale, though nothing else about it worked to back that up.
Shyamalan, perhaps believing too greatly in his own hype, made Lady In the Water too wordy for kids and tried way too hard to give the film some kind of deep and meaningful message that he never quite delivered. The result was a film that felt too stupid and self-aggrandising for adults to enjoy, but was way too much for children to follow.
The filmmaker, whose career to this point was still a very promising one, worked tirelessly through Lady In the Water to burn bridges with studios, actors, producers, critics and even friends, almost costing him his entire career.
11. Wide Awake (1998)
In M. Night Shyamalan’s first theatrical feature, the director delivered a story centring around his religion that would rival that of later release Signs in terms of how outwardly preachy it was.
Wide Awake follows the story of a school child who loses faith upon the death of his grandfather and is subsequently supported by teacher (and Nun) Rosie O’Donnell in his pursuit to find God once again.
Like much of Shyamalan’s work, Wide Awake seems to believe it is more profound than it actually is, creating the atmosphere of a message-movie rather than an immersive narrative experience.
The performance of child actor Joseph Cross is impressive, and the first piece of evidence that Shyamalan is perhaps better at directing children than adults, but rather than being an outright good or bad movie Wide Awake is distinctly average religious fare, the film being by far the director’s most forgettable outing (for better and for worse).
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10. Trap (2024)
M. Night Shyamalan’s 2024 offering failed to deliver on the promise of its concept and of its trailer, its big idea shrinking under the weight of convention.
Josh Hartnett was particularly strong as the dead-behind-the-eyes serial killer upon whose shoulders Shyamalan squarely rested his story, offering the kind of work that proved he’d been missed from mainstream studio filmmaking over the course of the past decade or so. And Shyamalan was able to craft some tremendously tense character interactions on the back of this performance and the film’s unique premise. But when a film offers all the fun of a serial killer trapped in a music concert and then moves beyond those confines without the imagination or subversion other ideas have been able to forge, it’s difficult to shake a sense of disappointment.
Trap is by no means as bad as the films we’ve listed thus far, with its heights even reaching into the realm of our top 5, but there’s no question that it was a missed opportunity for this filmmaker, a piece that invited that types of criticisms about his work being self-aggrandising and self-serving that plagued his least critically successful work.
