The Village: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

Forget the dead people. The new M. Night Shyamalan film, “The Village,” sees trees. Lots of trees. The director can’t stop filming them, racing through them, or watching them sway in the breeze.

He’s so fascinated by them, sometimes he’s even in the trees, shooting his characters from a high perch while they work through their haunting little melodramas down below.

Curiously, in spite of all this arbor, the film never goes out on a limb. As written, produced and directed by Shyamalan, “The Village” is the director’s weakest, most sterile effort to date, a silly, predictable plunge into the forest whose script should have been clearcut by a more talented writer before it went into production.

Like his last film, “Signs,” and 2000’s “Unbreakable,” “The Village” is damned by a plot that falls apart in ways that his exemplary “The Sixth Sense” didn’t.

Since so much of it hinges on key elements that can’t be revealed here, the barebones version goes like this: Set in what appears to be 19th century rural Pennsylvania, a small community fears what lurks beyond the forest that circles their land.

Known by the villagers as Those We Do Not Speak Of, these unseen, snorting beasts form a physical and emotional barrier that most dare not cross.

The village elders (William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson, Sigourney Weaver among them) are steadfast in their refusal to allow anyone to leave the village and go into the woods. Naturally, some of the younger villagers are tempted--particularly Adrian Brody’s Noah Percy. All of this leads to a chain of events that finds the blind Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) racing through the woods in an effort to find medicine for her ailing intended, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix).

In her yellow, hooded cloak, Ivy rides a rail of faith as she speeds toward a town she does not know and cannot see. Following her is The One That Causes Audience Laughter, a bizarre cross between a boar, a porcupine and a wolf, who is remarkably decked out in a red cape.

As we’ve come to expect, everything in a Shyamalan film builds to what the director hopes will be the big gasp, the defining moment when audiences discover that all isn’t what they were lead to believe. That’s just the case in “The Village.”

Still, five years out from “Sense,” it’s all become a bit boring and repetitive, as if Shyamalan can’t stop banging that same metal pot of his. Through his reputation and his films’ revealing marketing campaigns, he has trained audiences to go into his movies not only expecting a twist, but seeking it. Hitchcock was a master of this, but Shyamalan is an amateur. By treading that same territory time and again, he has stolen his own thunder, with his movies unable to support the hype.

At some point, hopefully with his next film, this promising director will break free from all the trappings that bind him and, just to clear his head, try something different—perhaps a comedy or a romance. Sometimes, one has to get away from The Thing That One Knows in order to rediscover why The Thing That Once Worked, Worked So Well.

Grade: D+