I almost posted to this thread earlier today to ask the same thing. I think he knows, but I think it could be argued that it’s ambiguous.
About halfway through. Didn’t figure out “Usual Suspects” or “No Way Out”. Remember that one?
What a twist!
That would be my answer as well. Cole seems frightened when he first meets Malcolm, and for the early part of the movie Malcolm is working to gain Cole’s trust. This makes sense if Cole thinks he’s just an ordinary child psychiatrist, but makes even more sense if he realizes that he’s a ghost. IIRC it seems like Cole immediately recognizes all the other ghosts as ghosts. It may be that Malcolm seemed different from the others because he knew who Cole was and said he wanted to help him, so Cole arguably may have had doubts as to whether he was a ghost or not. But while the movie’s editing obscured the fact that Malcolm never had a conversation with anyone but Cole, Cole presumably would have noticed that his mother never said anything to or even about his new psychiatrist.
Now that I think of it, Cole apparently never mentioned Malcolm to his mother either. While young boys often aren’t real chatty, it seems like the sort of thing that probably would have come up if Cole had believed that Malcolm was alive.
It’s hard for me to remember now but I don’t think I knew the “twist” before hand, and I think it surprised me at the end when we were supposed to have it “revealed” to us.
I am not surprised some people saw it from the very beginning though.
Remember at the end he sees the vision of the bike rider with her smashed and bloody face? How Cole sees the poisoned girl ghost always vomiting? And how when Malcolm he realizes he is a ghost he reaches back and his hand comes back bloody?
I think Cole sees the ghosts as they were when they died. And from that my personal interpretation is that Cole is seeing Malcolm as a constantly-bleeding-out-from-his-gunshot ghost. Which easily explains his initial trepidation :D. But Malcolm is the first ghost who actually tries to speak to him gently and Cole is probably a little inured to gore by then so he doesn’t just bolt straight out . But I think for Cole it is a constant visual horror show of mangled ghosts.
Malcolm also had his jacket on the majority of times, and he was bleeding out most of his exit wound in the back.
I didn’t catch the twist until I was supposed to.
What made it such a great twist was that there were a lot of clues. For those of you who said you saw it early; I believe you. There were a lot of oddities in the movie that I ignored as Hollywoodisms. You know, things that happen a certain way in movies that don’t happen in real life. Like when Crowe meets Cole for the first time it’s outdoors and the kid’s mother isn’t even around. Or when Crowe doesn’t speak up when he accuses Cole’s mother of abusing him.
Saw it cold, didn’t catch the twist at all until it was revealed.
Spent the next three or four days counting the number of stories I had seen that had the same damn thing and wondering what was wrong with me. I was quite excited to see what this guy would do next.
Long term, that wasn’t a good idea.
I honestly don’t remember. I think I was tipped off to there being a twist, but still didn’t figure it out completely until the reveal.
When it comes to movie twists, though, I suspect there is a large element of confirmation bias when it comes to people remembering that they figured it out ahead of time. My suspicion is that when people are watching a twist movie a feeling midway through of “Hmm, Virgil’s not telling the whole truth. He knows more than he’s letting on” becomes “I knew who he really was the whole time” after the fact.
I never watched it, but I caught an episode of Conan where Andy casually spoiled the ending, much to Conan’s (possibly feigned) chagrin. Andy spoiled it for me, too. I thought it was a funny bit, though.
I remember noticing oddities through out the movie like clothes but didn’t put it together until the end. Another movie was League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I kept thinking Dorian Grey was a bad guy in his story, what is going on? Oh. got it now.
I figured it out when he said “I see dead people, but they don’t know they’re dead”. Ooooohhhh…
Course we were all duped in that the true big reveal is it turns out M. Night Shamalamadingdong is actually a pretty crappy director and probably just kinda lucked out.
I got spoiled on it before I saw it. Like with “The Crying Game,” nobody came right out and told me precisely what the big twist was, but the way they hinted at it was enough for me to figure it out.
So, when I did finally see the movie, I could appreciate those little scenes where it looks like Malcolm is interacting with other people because he’s standing or sitting near them, but they aren’t really aware of his presence.
He didn’t ever think the mother was abusing Cole, did he? It’s my recollection that he suspected that someone was abusing Cole, but that he was pretty sure it wasn’t the mother. It didn’t seem odd to me that he’d want to wait to find out more before making a formal report of child abuse.
I figured it out by piecing together a bunch of jokes, parodies, and random comments relating to it a few months after it came out. I never saw it.
This was my experience as well.
I went into the movie almost on a lark. Was new in town, didn’t know anyone, and wanted to kill a couple of hours. I don’t think I had even seen ads for the movie. The poster had Bruce Willis on it and that was enough for me.
Not only did the ending blow me away, but the whole interaction between Cole and Malcolm was handled beautifully. The whole film you think the psychiatrist is trying to help the boy and all the while it’s the boy trying to help the psychiatrist realize the situation. Some very touching moments between them, and between the boy and the mom as well. So much more than just a “twist ending.”
Both of those got me. By the time we reached the end of “No Way Out,” I had completely forgotten the movie began with Kevin Costner’s character being interrogated in a one-way mirror room, and then when he began speaking Russian I was utterly floored.
And the “Usual Suspects” realization came exactly when the movie wanted me to get it: as the detective saw the various clues around the room that showed where Kint’s story names/characters had come from.
Maybe. But in my case, no, since I cemented my insight by whispering it to my date, who was then pissed at me for spoiling it.