All The Feels
How Spike Jonze and M. Night Shyamalan film the intelligence of presence.
Openings
A shadowy hallway reveals a figure in the thin light of a half-open door. In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley’s rumpled caution answers a knock with a question: “Were you followed?” In Cabaret, the painted face of the emcee spirals toward us from contorting reflections until his leering grin becomes the expression of the whole room. Both moments do what the best films do from their first frame: they awaken attention.
The image isn’t telling us what to think; it’s making us feel that something is already alive before we arrive.
The Intelligence of Presence
My favorite films begin this way—by giving presence room to unfold. What we see is only part of what’s happening; the rest is sensation, inference, atmosphere. In Her and The Sixth Sense, two directors solve the same problem from opposite sides: how to make something feel vividly there when it can’t be directly shown. Their success depends on the same human capacity—the way we meet stories halfway, supplying belief, emotion, and continuity.
Spike Jonze’s Her opens on an extreme close-up of Joaquin Phoenix. The shot is so tight even his chin and forehead are cropped away. His skin tone, pale and desaturated, floats in a blur of creams and reds that lend him the color his own face has lost. For the next two hours, this man, Theodore, will talk almost exclusively to the air around him. His isolation is as compressed as the framing; his world, drained of warmth, glows with the fatigue of memory. The expired-film palette suggests not emptiness but aging exposure to a world saturated by longing.
M. Night Shyamalan chooses a dusty filament light bulb for the opening shot of The Sixth Sense. It’s the only source of illumination for a woman descending creaking stairs to a cellar. The light’s heat is deceptive: it belongs to a world haunted not by absence but by the persistence of dread. Like Theodore, Cole—the boy who will soon utter those famous words, “I see dead people”—speaks into the air, searching for response from those only he can see.
Stories bring out our most enjoyable sense-making skills. Human beings are innately pattern seeking, puzzle solving creatures. I like a broken little trail of facts. I get a buzz from a bit of misdirection and from that small thrill when something—what is it?—feels slightly out of kilter. No art form exploits this human gift more precisely than cinema, which chooses not only what we see but how we interpret it.
Editing as Empathy
Cinema doesn’t trick us so much as invite us to collaborate. Its power lies not in deception but in recognition—in how we participate in creating what feels real. A face held in close-up can belong to grief or to triumph, depending on what follows it: a burning house or an awards dinner. The expression hasn’t changed, only the context we supply.
Editing becomes a call to empathy, a choreography between what’s shown and what we perceive.
The finest films depend on this intelligence—the instinct we all share for completing the image, for sensing presence where the screen gives us only fragments.
The difficulty in Her wasn’t recording a disembodied voice; it was filming a presence that couldn’t be seen. Editor Eric Zumbrunnen understood the paradox: “With a film about two people in conversation, you do kind of want to see the other person. And the fact that you couldn’t do that—well, it wasn’t easy. You could go to the shot of the device. But we were very careful about how often we did that.”
His work wasn’t about disguising Samantha’s non-existence but about building her presence in the space between frames. Her voice has to inhabit the air around Theodore, to charge the room with companionship without reducing her to a blinking dot. Zumbrunnen called this “the challenge of making you really feel this relationship.”
He cut sparingly to the device, not to conceal absence but to protect the illusion of aliveness—to let the viewer’s own belief complete the scene. “There are times we specifically cut to the device,” he said, “but that’s to show the gulf between them.” Each cut is an act of empathy: how long he holds on Theodore, how much silence he leaves, determines whether Samantha feels near or far. It’s editing as emotional architecture, a way of letting presence radiate beyond the visible.
Both films face the same puzzle from opposite directions: how do you show a connection that can’t be seen? Jonze and Zumbrunnen find it in the intervals between cuts, where breath and voice build a sense of companionship. Shyamalan finds it in the stillness of a frame, where bodies share a room but not perception. Each trusts the audience’s reflex for empathy—that quick, unconscious completion of what’s only half visible. Presence, in both cases, is a shared construction, an act of seeing that belongs as much to us as to the film.
Alignment
The deep pleasure of rewatching The Sixth Sense comes from noticing how Shyamalan builds presence not through revelation, but through alignment. In one early scene, Cole’s mother, Lynn, sits waiting in an armchair; across from her, Malcolm sits in another. The composition suggests a shared waiting—a conference between two adults anxious for a child. When Cole enters, he looks toward Malcolm, yet Lynn never acknowledges the doctor. The framing quietly holds both sightlines, as if each could see the other.
Shyamalan’s intelligence lies in the steadiness of that shot. He doesn’t point out what’s missing; he lets our ordinary sense-making fill the room with presumed connection. Malcolm’s slight tilt of the head, Lynn’s responsive posture—these gestures complete a conversation that never occurs. On rewatch, we recognize that what we took for shared presence was only parallel awareness, each person vivid but unseen by the other. The film’s tension isn’t the absence of life but the persistence of it—how feeling continues even when recognition fails. That’s the secret engine of Shyamalan’s craft: he films belief itself, the human instinct to feel together, even when the world’s angles no longer meet.
Belief
You know, the more I think about it, the difference in their approaches to the challenge may come down to what each believes about cinema itself. Jonze, who came up through music videos, treats film as something assembled out of lived fragments — a medium discovered in the edit rather than dictated on the page. He shoots as if the real movie will emerge later, in the rhythm between shots, with his collaborators gathered around a screen. Shyamalan’s belief runs the other way. He writes every frame before he shoots it, trusts story structure the way a playwright trusts language. He rarely shoots coverage; he wants precision, not options. His actors supply warmth and intuition, but the shape is architectural. Jonze looks for presence in discovery. Shyamalan gives it life by design.
Aliveness
My favorite films bring me back to life from the dullness of coping—they sharpen my attention to the world instead of letting it blur. Everything seems more articulate after a good story: the light on a face, the hum of a street, the pulse of color in an ordinary room. The best storytelling isn’t cleverness or plot reversal but an act of understanding—of seeing and being seen.
A well-made film reminds me that I’m always in conversation with the visible world, that presence is never exhausted by a single look.
There is always more aliveness waiting to be noticed.