How does the therapist get into the kid's apartment in The Sixth Sense (1999)?

Question

How does the therapist, Malcolm Crowe (played by Bruce Willis), get into the kid's apartment in The Sixth Sense?

Nobody can see him, and the boy (Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment) hasn't come home yet. If he knocks on the door and the mother answers, she would see no one. And he would be introducing himself, but she couldn't hear him, and then she'd just shut the door. They show him with the mother, but there is no interaction between them. He doesn't know he's a ghost, so how could he be there? And it's later that he follows the boy into the church and introduces himself. No way he should be in that apartment.

Answer 1

It's implied that ghosts experience life discontinuously but don't notice, in much the same way that the audience sees the scenes of the movie discontinuously but doesn't notice. As Cole (the boy) says, ghosts "only see what they want to see."

Once the twist is revealed, the audience is meant to understand that even though scenes like Malcolm sitting in the room with Cole's mother really happened, we (like him) merely assumed that there was an offscreen interaction leading up to the scene. One interpretation is that the scenes we see with Malcolm are the only ones that "happen" for him, and he just rationalizes or ignores the details of how he got there.

A concrete example of this is the door to the basement in Malcolm's house. A few times in the movie, we see Malcolm pulling on the stuck door in frustration, followed by a cut to him working in his basement office. Before the twist, we're meant to assume that he got the door open and walked down into the basement, but after the twist, it's revealed that the door is blocked by an end table, and there's no way he could have opened it without noticing the table. Not only can ghosts move through physical obstacles, they don't even notice them if they aren't expecting them to be there.

Answer 2

This used to bother me as well, but after film school and years as an indie filmmaker and screenwriter, my most recent viewing of the film (tonight, actually) since I was much younger, answered the question in one line, stated numerous times in the movie: “They only see what they want to see.” This brilliantly brief and efficient line of dialogue covers all the bases completely. This indicates that the whole film is like a dream to Bruce Willis (Malcolm) in the way that dreams for us are sort of stream-of-consciousness. He’s not even aware it’s happening. Maybe the only scenes that happen to him are the scenes we see him in during the movie, so the whole dream is really just over an hour long, in linear time, if that’s even the way time works for a ghost (it clearly doesn’t).

Many people who come back from a near death experience, in fact a few thousand people documented, state that there is a life-review. Like what the Christians think is “judgement day”, except it’s really just a judgement-free observation of your life on this earth in a way that allows you to learn from the whole experience and give this knowledge back to the collective consciousness. Whether you believe that or not, that’s how I like to see this film. Like a “final review” to “close unresolved chapters”, or doors, to use a visual from the film. The Catholics call it Purgatory.

I personally don’t believe anyone sticks around as ghosts, but that everyone goes to the same place after death, and that this life is a choice filled with choices, and pain and joy both are for the sake of learning and growth.

That said, it’s a brilliant concept for a film, and likely does have its finger on-the-pulse of something true, deeper, and profound.

I think it’s a masterpiece of a film…although my personal fave is “Unbreakable.”