Unbreakable (2000)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
An ordinary man makes an extraordinary discovery when a train accident leaves his fellow passengers dead — and him unscathed. The answer to this mystery could lie with the mysterious Elijah Price, a man who suffers from a disease that renders his bones as fragile as glass.
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16 films that influenced Unbreakable
What critics say influenced Unbreakable
Peter Weir's elegiac, underrated "Fearless" (from a script by Rafael Yglesias) dealt more explicitly with survivor's guilt.
But they might confuse it with "Fearless," the spooky Peter Weir-directed masterpiece that stars Jeff Bridges as a plane crash survivor who believes himself invincible after the tragedy.
He knows that he has a gift, but unlike Jeff Bridges' plane crash survivor in 1993's "Fearless," he hides from it and takes the rest of his family down with him.
The magic and the guilt of survival have been explored before in movies, notably in Peter Weir's brilliant, underrated Fearless.
Reckless follies are a gift from the movie gods, ranging from D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" to John Boorman's "Exorcist II: The Heretic" to any given five minutes of a film by Leos Carax, such as "The Lovers on the Bridge" or the recent "Pola X."
The movie has the foggy look so fashionable in the films of Ingmar Bergman such as "The Seventh Seal," even some domestic scenes that could have come from the Swedish director's "Scenes from a Marriage"-- the sorts of vistas that could tip a film from art into pretension, as Woody Allen showed us in his satiric "Shadows and Fog."
Like the seemingly extraneous scene where Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson, in clothes that look borrowed from Star Wars and a weird James Brown coif) is born, a flashback to 1961 shot mostly in a mirror, in which an attending doctor discovers that the newborn's limbs have broken from the stress of birth.
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"Unbreakable" begins with Willis in full "I Walked With a Zombie" mode as David Dunn, a phlegmatic security guard returning by train to his home in Philadelphia.
The irony should not be lost on the fact that David Fincher's Mank, a dramatized feature about the writing of one of Orson Welles's greatest films, Citizen Kane (1941), is being released by the streaming giant Netflix.
"I look back at other directors that I admire, and you see collaborations that establish a pattern of filmmaking -- Hitchcock with some of the actors he kept repeating, or better yet, Spielberg with Richard Dreyfuss in the first two movies, Jaws and Close Encounters [actually, those were Spielberg's second and third theatrical releases].
His films have an atmosphere of richly foreboding ambiguity that seems to fuse the various styles of Hitchcock, Nicolas Roeg, David Lynch, and the Michael Mann of Manhunter.
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The Sixth Sense had a marvelous creepy intimacy, but forgive me for pointing out that its plot, a cross between The Shining and Ghost, was mostly smoke and mirrors (wouldn't Bruce Willis have tried, at least once, to have a conversation with somebody other than his wife and Haley Joel Osment?).
The movie has the foggy look so fashionable in the films of Ingmar Bergman such as "The Seventh Seal," even some domestic scenes that could have come from the Swedish director's "Scenes from a Marriage"-- the sorts of vistas that could tip a film from art into pretension, as Woody Allen showed us in his satiric "Shadows and Fog."