*SPOILER ALERT*

When I first found out that M. Night Shyamalan was making a new movie I truly didn’t know what to expect. This was the same man who made the critically acclaimed “The Sixth Sense” and the catastrophically inaccurate train wreck that was “The Last Airbender”. However, upon seeing the trailer and being thoroughly terrified, I was curious enough to fork over some money out of my perpetually dwindling college budget to go see it.

Although I did feel like the trailer WAY overhyped the film in terms of its fear factor, I left the theater feeling slightly off for a different reason. I was expecting M. Night Shyamalan to deliver something fresh and new and found myself disappointed. Instead what I got was a movie that gave into tired old stereotypes while resembling the “Psycho” on steroids.

Kevin, the main villain in the film, has 23 and counting different personalities, each of which manifest randomly. After he abducts three girls, it’s a race against time to figure out how to use his psychological condition against him in order to escape. Although, Kevin regularly sees a psychologist, she cannot see past her own emotional connections to her patients in order to see that in reality, Kevin has trapped three teenage girls in the maintenance levels of a zoo.

The way in which this movie portrays the mentally ill and psychologists couldn’t be further from the truth. As movies tend to do, mentally ill people are portrayed as monsters instead of people who are just struggling to live their everyday life. Examples of this include “Psycho”, “American Psycho”, and basically any movie with the word psycho in the title. Not to mention the gross violations of conduct that the psychologist in the movie conducts. Hopefully, movies can break these stereotypes in the future, which help contribute to the stigmatization of mental illness in society.