Every M. Night Shyamalan Movie Ranked Worst To Best

M. Night Shyamalan built his reputation on crafting thoughtful blockbuster films with non-blockbuster budgets. Of the director's first seven films, none cost more than $75 million to make. It was a bit surprising, then, that on the heels of two major flops, Shyamalan managed to procure a whopping $150 million for his adaptation of the fantastical adventure The Last Airbender. Maybe he just couldn't the resist the temptation to go bigger than he'd ever gone before, but those who bought a ticket to The Last Airbender — and the studios that financed it — were left wondering exactly where that money went.

A wave of abysmal reviews greeted The Last Airbender's release. Considering that Airbender — intended as the first part of a trilogy — is based on a wildly inventive Nickelodeon series, one simply has to marvel at the dull factor of this adaption driven by soulless performances, stale visuals, uninspired set pieces, and unbelievably bad special effects. Needless to say, all plans for a Shyamalan-directed trilogy were promptly halted, though the film still fared reasonably well at the box office: The Last Airbender actually managed to pull in north of $300 million in worldwide grosses, which may be the biggest twist Shyamalan has ever pulled.

M. Night Shyamalan started working on his debut film Praying With Anger while still a student at NYU. He wrote, produced, funded, directed, and starred in the project himself. It revolves around an Americanized young man of East Indian descent returning home to rediscover his roots — and Shyamalan, who was born in India and raised in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia, based Praying With Anger on his own return trip to India in his teens. Needless to say, it was an intensely personal story.

While Praying With Anger lacks the supernatural elements Shyamalan has become known for, it still sees him exploring familiar themes of family, spirituality, and identity, and with a warmth and sense of humor all but absent from much of his later work. As with most debuts, Praying With Anger isn't without its problems. You can see him struggling with the tone and pacing, and Shyamalan — never a particularly strong performer — proves he likely took on one job too many by casting himself in the lead. Whether he made that decision based on necessity or on hubris, Shyamalan's flat, detached performance is often painful to watch. Luckily, there's enough going on beneath the surface of Praying With Anger to keep it engaging. At the very least, it's a compelling — if not particularly satisfying — look at a first-time director figuring out how movies work.

After startling his fanbase into concern with Lady In The Water, Shymalan continued to stumble with The Happening, a sci-fi thriller that follows a teacher, his wife, and their friends as they try to outrun a mysterious, fatal plague. On paper, the concept has the makings of another intriguing Twilight Zone-ish tale for Shyamalan. But the film features career-worst performances from Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, a third act that can only be described as mind-bogglingly stupid, and the sort of hackneyed, tin-eared writing that leaves one wondering how The Happening got off the ground at all.   

There's a reason The Happening feels unpolished. Shyamalan was working on the script while the 2007 writer's strike loomed over Hollywood. Fearing a lengthy content drought, studios began fast-tracking productions to fill a potential void, The Happening among them. It was released to some of the worst reviews of Shyamalan's career, but the one thing it has going for it is a campy, irreverent, B-movie charm that never quite lets you take the onscreen absurdity too seriously. That B-movie feel may not be intentional, but it's the only reason The Happening is at all watchable, and ultimately keeps it form claiming the title of "Worst Shyamalan Movie." Now who wants a lemon drink?

It's hard to believe how many years have passed since M. Night Shyamalan turned the superhero genre on its head with his gloriously grounded origin story Unbreakable — and it's still surprising how sneakily Night shocked the world by connecting his marvelously unhinged multiple personality/psycho-killer thriller Split to the same cinematic universe. Yet here we are, bearing witness to the rarest of big-screen events — a comic book-centric crossover/mashup/whatever based on wholly original heroes, villains, and ... well, something else entirely unforeseen.

Of that "unforeseen" element, we'll say nothing else so as not to spoil one of the more shocking twists Shyamalan has ever penned. Just know that it's a big part of why Glass has met with its share of criticism. Know as well that Shyamalan's unexpected trilogy-capper is neither quite as bad nor as great as you've likely already heard.

Folks going into Glass expecting a heroes vs. villains throwdown on the level of the latest Marvel confection will be seriously underwhelmed by the meticulously paced action unfolding before them. However, those who come for a superhero/supervillian psychological thriller akin to Unbreakable and Split will find themselves right at home amongst Glass' morally twisted tale of good and evil. One whose ambition ultimately trumps its quality (via some decidedly spotty scripting from Shyamalan himself), but also one that takes more risks, has more fun, and features more stark, real-world stakes than any film spawned by the MCU.

The Village might be the most underrated film in Shymalan's oeuvre. Yes, its central conceit errs on the side of shamelessly manipulative. Yes, the film's big twists were either underwhelming or a little too obvious. But while those issues are impossible to ignore, they're not really the point. They exist more as fan-serviced genre fodder and structural plot devices than focal points of the story. 

That story — a mournful, gothic chamber piece bent on exploring the weighty correlation between grief and fear — happens to be one of Shyamalan's best. It's presented in the guise of a straight-up horror tale that finds an isolated village on edge when the mystical creatures who dwell in the surrounding woods appear to break a long-standing treaty. There's a lot more to that story, of course, but Shyamalan wisely focuses on interpersonal drama, allowing Roger Deakins' stark, expressive photography and James Newton Howard's dolefully romantic score to bestow The Village with an emotive yet disquieting unease. In the process, he tells one of his most patently human stories — one that's well worth revisiting.

The Visit didn't quite put Shyamalan back on top, but it proved he was finally back in the game, and suggested he was ready to take his stories into deeper, darker places. Armed with an edgy new approach and backing from a risk-taking studio in Blumhouse, Shyamalan was about to get down and dirty with a new genre medley. It would turn out to be one of the wildest, creepiest rides of his career.

Packed with more twists than any previous Shymalan film and anchored by an eerily transfixing performance from James McAvoy, Split follows the nightmarish tale of a man with multiple personality disorder. As he struggles to find balance in his fractured mind, a dangerous new personality threatens to take control and force him to do unspeakable things. It's a brilliant blend of psychological thriller and straight up psycho killer horror, and it plays both sides of that coin with such style and grace that Shyamalan earned some of the best reviews and box office returns of his career — all while unexpectedly leading into a belated sequel to one of his more widely acclaimed films.

If you were expecting a shocking twist to end this list, we'd like to offer our sincerest apologies. As many of M. Night Shyamalan's films as we adore, it always comes back to his breakout supernatural hit The Sixth Sense. Twist ending aside, perhaps the most surprising thing about The Sixth Sense is that it was released little more than year after his so-so family dramedy Wide Awake, making it a directorial quantum leap on the level of that jump cut from 2001.

Seems all Shyamalan needed to find his groove was a couple of ghosts and a terrified 10-year-old. The Sixth Sense's tale of a kind-hearted boy who sees dead people found the director working with a new level of confidence; honing his writing, visual acumen, and tempered emotional palette into a signature style that would permeate every film he'd make in its wake. It also found him coaxing a career re-defining performance out of Bruce Willis and one of the greatest child performances in history from young Haley Joel Osment. Yes, that twist is the stuff of legend, but the story still works even when you already know what's coming. Perhaps what sets Shyamalan's supernatural puzzle box apart from the pack is that, no matter how many times you watch The Sixth Sense, there always seems to be something new to discover.