After Earth, Part I: Much better than you think
With the artistic, commercial and critical success of The Visit and Split, it is about time to soberly unearth the very real qualities of M. Night Shyamalan’s disproportionally maligned middle period.
Split, Part I: M. Night Shyamalan goes crazy and tender
The new leaner, meaner version of M. Night Shyamalan has made a bizarre but thoroughly gripping film, providing an emotionally deep understanding of why psychological survival mechanisms arise in abuse victims.
Desperate connections: An analysis of Anne Sewitsky’s Homesick (2015)
“Homesick primarily plays on the unspoken. Dialogues are marked by pauses and silent tensions between characters. Most films increase their pace towards a climax, but in Sewitsky the pauses just grow longer and more pregnant.”
Louder Than Bombs: Joachim Trier’s play on perspective
As so often in films, Louder Than Bombs is not a dissertation of, but a meditation on its themes and motifs. Seen in isolation, words and deeds may seem unexceptional – it is as a whole that writer-director Joachim Trier and co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt’s film takes flight.
The Village, Part III: Love, murder and monsters
Whispered echoes, nightmare logic, high melodrama, relentlessly ingenious staging – this visual analysis of M. Night Shyamalan’s pastoral masterpiece preserves the film’s own gestures, often rearranged in surprising combinations.
The Village, Part II: A tapestry of characters
After a general evaluation of this M. Night Shyamalan tour de force, the large cast of characters and their relationships are examined, with a special emphasis on subtext and how it is expressed through mise-en-scène.
The Village, Part I: Motifs and story arc
Before The Visit came M. Night Shyamalan’s early masterpiece The Village (2004). Mismarketed and misunderstood as a horror movie, it has gained a following as a mood piece of pastoral beauty, intense emotion and stylised lyricism.
It Follows, part 1: Evil threatens Suburbia
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows inspires awe far outside the ranks of horror film aficionados. This first entry in a series of three articles looks at 10 possible ways into the film, trying to put into words and pictures what makes the film so special.
It Follows, part 2: Nightmare in red
David Robert Mitchell offers an intelligent and deeply deliberate use of motifs. We reveal how sleep, water and the colour red create an “invisible”, parallel trajectory to the surface story of It Follows.
It Follows, part 3: The aesthetics of fright
David Robert Mitchell unites art film and genre movie in It Follows. Its staging and aesthetics is explored in the last of three analytical articles about the film.
M. Night Shyamalan analysis project overview
Montages is running an analysis project about M. Night Shyamalan entire production, originating from studies of his early works from 1999 to 2006: The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002), The Village (2004) and Lady in the Water (2006).
Signs, Part IV: Visual style
In Signs scenes do not only exist to drive the plot forward. Their formally distinctive staging creates additional layers, encouraging meanings and symbols, often enigmatic.