M. Night Shyamalan has had one of the strangest and most fascinating bodies of work in Hollywood. Few filmmakers can claim one of the best horror movies of all time as beloved as The Sixth Sense, a pop culture phenomenon as divisive as The Village, a late-career comeback as satisfying as Split, and also the maligned Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation. The director contains multitudes, and apparently, his next movie is already testing extremely well, and one hot fact has me so hyped.
Shyamalan revealed during Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront presentation (via ScreenRant) that his upcoming psychological thriller Remain is the highest-testing movie of his career. That is a very bold thing to say when your career includes not only The Sixth Sense, which remains one of the great theatrical crowd-pleasers of the last several decades, but also Unbreakable, Split, and Knock at the Cabin.
Remain stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Tate Donovan, an architect struggling with depression who relocates to Cape Cod and meets a mysterious woman named Wren, played by Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor. Julie Hagerty is also part of the cast, but the movie is unfortunately not slated for the 2026 movie calendar. If you're as excited to catch the flick in cinemas as I am, we have a bit of a wait, as it is currently set to hit theaters on February 5, 2027.
That premise already sounds like prime territory for the Signs filmmaker. Give him an isolated coastal setting, a grief-haunted protagonist, a mysterious woman and the promise of supernatural dread, and I’m going to start sniffing around for hidden clues like a raccoon in a movie theater dumpster. But the real hot fact here is the testing claim. Shyamalan’s movies are often engineered around the audience experience, whether that means the slow dawning horror of The Sixth Sense, the chamber-piece pressure of Signs or the gleeful genre trap of, well, Trap.
The other fascinating wrinkle is that Remain is not just an upcoming Shyamalan movie, but is also tied to a novel he co-created with Nicholas Sparks, the author behind The Notebook. Sparks wrote the book version, while the Knock at the Cabin director developed the movie, meaning both artists are telling the same core story in different mediums rather than simply adapting one version into the other.
On paper, that pairing sounds almost genetically engineered to scramble my brain. It is also such a strange idea that it just might work. Interestingly, the approach is not without precedent. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke developed 2001: A Space Odyssey in a similar way, with the film and novel evolving side by side. Fans of both know the two versions are different, but each works on its own terms.
Maybe that is what makes Remain so intriguing. Shyamalan brings dread, mystery and the possibility of a rug-pull. Sparks brings romance, longing and big emotional swings. Together, those sensibilities could make Remain too much of a movie, or exactly enough of a movie. Either way, I’m excited to sit in a theater and find out.
There is also something exciting about the writer-director talking this confidently before the movie is even out. Test screenings are not destiny. Plenty of movies test well and vanish, while others stumble early and find their people later. But “highest-testing movie of my career” is not a small flex. It suggests audiences may be responding to the exact blend of romance and dread he and Sparks were aiming for.
Jake Gyllenhaal is another reason this has my attention. He is one of the better actors at playing men who seem one bad night away from unraveling completely. Dynevor, meanwhile, has the kind of screen presence that can make a mystery feel elegant rather than gimmicky. If Remain uses both performers well, this could be more than another twisty thriller.
For now, there is still a long wait before Remain reaches theaters. But M. Night Shyamalan saying this is the highest-testing movie of his career is enough to move it way up my radar. I do not know what the twist is, or if there even is one, but I do know I’m already suspicious of everyone in Cape Cod. Heck, maybe I'll pick up the novel while I wait for the page-to-screen adaptation.
