The Sixth Sense

Is Bruce Willis in danger of being typecast as the intense academic psychologist? Having already played one in The Color of Night (1994), he revisits this persona in The Sixth Sense, a paranormal chiller which has had them gibbering with fear in the aisles in the US. This is a conventional horror movie with all the trimmings: a kind of stadium act, compared with the unplugged, acoustic set offered by The Blair Witch Project.

Willis is Dr Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist dealing with a profoundly disturbed little boy, Cole (Haley Joel Osment) who claims that he can see "dead people". At first sceptical, Dr Crowe gradually comes to believe that little Cole can indeed commune with the unquiet souls, who are reaching out to him for help. And, yes, the scenes where Cole does so can be very creepy indeed.

But there is a strange tinge of schmaltz which begins to ooze out like ectoplasm towards the end, and finally, as another gore-splattered spectre wanders shyly into shot, there is a terrible temptation to giggle. It is this unfortunate slide into absurdity, rather than the film's now infamous final plot twist, which is The Sixth Sense's chief characteristic at the end, and stops it from being the classic chiller it could have been.