The great god of laughter, his sides forever split, is not pleased by black comedies, for the simple reason that they tend not to be very funny. The comedy of blackness is usually a kind of local anesthetic, something frozen, producing not humor but a dead-skinned tolerance for the horrible; and there is no situation so ghastly that it cannot be made worse by a bad joke.

One approaches the films of M. Night Shyamalan with the slightly hysterical goodwill of a parent attending a school play. Senses gaping, disbelief suspended a mile high, one so wants the evening to go well. And if clumsiness and mawkishness should rule the hour, well, so what? We'll clap like seals and go home happy that no one flubbed his or her lines or knocked over the scenery. The reason for this, I think, is the transparent sincerity of Shyamalan's effort to entertain. In today's Hollywood, it looks like innocence. Limpidly free of the contemporary vices of deftness, velocity and panache, Shyamalan works hard for his audience, and you can feel it.