Movie Review: The Village

M. Night Shyamalan's fourth movie is of course difficult to talk about without giving stuff away but I'll try. it's set in a 19th century village surround by woods that the people don't go into because dangerous creatures live in them. The young boys of the village play a game at night of standing with their backs up against the forrest for as long as they can before getting scared. The creatures wear red cloaks and the villagers sometimes wear gold ones.

We meet several families, the Walkers led by Edward (William Hurt) and Kitty (Judy Greer) with two daughters Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) who is blind and Tabitha (Jayne Atkinson). Alice Hunt (Sigourney Weaver) is a single mother of Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix). Both of the hunt girls have feelings for the restrained and serious Lucius. Then there are Robert and Vivan Percy, parents of Noah (Adrien Brody) who is, as they would say in that time, slow. All of these parents are part of the elder council who rule the town and they have to deal with strange goings on as the creatures start skinning livestock. When someone gets injured, someone ventures through the woods to "the towns" to get medicine.

Since it's a Shyamalan film we know to expect some twist. This meta-knowledge hurts his films. In order to avoid us merely waiting for the end, or constantly thinking up theories, the film has to engage us throughout. Good fleshed out characters and intresting plot developments, not just hints for the twist. I didn't love most of The Sixth Sense, I found it slow and realized that as soon as I got engaged in a scene it switched to another, sometimes abruptly which seemed unnatural, but the ending made up for it. I think Unbreakable was his worst film because I didn't care about the characters (it's hard to care about a numb Bruce Willis) and they themselves would have figured out the twist if they were really in those situations. The film was merely a construct to keep a mystery from the audience at the expense of everything else. Signs got this balance better but still twisted the plot outside of authenticity of the characters that he created.

Ivy is an interesting character and her sister has some life in her. We're not quite sure what they see in Lucius but the romance story moves and is at least enough to hold our interest. William Hurt plays the typical Shyamalan stoic but so do the other adults and in their roles as elders we accept this. Life in this 19th century town is mostly missing. The romance while interesting isn't a lot of screne time and rather than seeing views of everyday life, we see scenes that bait the twist. So I found myself wondering what was going to happen and within the first 10 minutes guessed correctly. There was a point in the middle where I had my doubts but it didn't last long. Now that wouldn't be enough to have ruined this film. What did is how inconsequential the film is. If there was more of a metaphor to our own world or more put into how these people live their lives and the moral choices they make, this film would give us something other than is our twist theory right. Shyamalan's films are films for films' sake, but after a few of them, we've been conditioned to know what to expect. To still entertain, he has to add more to the mix. There is a reason it's so hard to write reviews about his films without giving the ending away, there's nothing else in them to write about.