The advertisements in the US for The Village, which opens in Taiwan today, promised that "nothing can prepare you." Nothing, that is, except M. Night Shyamalan's last three movies and a passing acquaintance with The Twilight Zone. It is hard to think of another filmmaker so utterly committed to the predictable manufacture of narrative surprise. His supernatural conceits may vary from picture to picture -- ghosts in The Sixth Sense, comic-book superheroics in Unbreakable, space aliens and crop circles in Signs -- but his stories are always built around a carefully disguised, meticulously prepared twist.
You can pass a pleasant few minutes outside the theater talking it over with your friends, but the conversations, like the movies that inspire them, tend to sound the same. For every innocent who professes amazement, there will be a wiseguy who says he saw it coming all along and an earnest analyst who picks the whole thing apart, looking for clues, foreshadowings and logical inconsistencies.
The last thing I want to do is spoil the fun, meager though it is. I will say, though, that while I am generally pretty obtuse about these matters, I had an inkling early on of where The Village was going, which I then dismissed as too ridiculous to consider. When I turned out to be right I felt less vindicated than cheated. The film's ridiculousness would not be so irksome if Shyamalan did not take his sleight of hand so seriously, if he did not insist on dressing this scary, silly, moderately clever fairy tale in a somber cloak of allegory.
I suppose it is to his credit that he wants the audience to think -- about fear, security and the fine line between rationality and superstition -- as well as tremble, but his ideas are as sloppy and obvious as his direction is elegant and restrained. He turns an artful gothic tale into a homework assignment.
His impressive cast, meanwhile, bustles around as if The Village were the school play -- Our Town, maybe, or The Lottery. Their village, which appears not to have a name, is somewhere in the preindustrial wilds of Pennsylvania. It is cut off from the rest of the world (referred to as "the towns") by forests inhabited by monstrous, mysterious creatures.
An elaborate set of rules and customs has been devised to keep the beasts at bay: there are watchtowers, warning bells and amber flags and robes, and anything red ("the bad color") must be buried.
Domestic animals are sometimes found killed and partly skinned, and now and again the monsters emerge from the shadows to frighten and warn the villagers. They are propitiated with fresh meat and earnest meetings of the village elders, a distinguished group that includes William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson and Cherry Jones.
Otherwise, life goes on in its normal, old-fashioned storybook way. People speak in a stately, wordy idiom, disdaining contractions and using the subjunctive with breathtaking precision. Hurt was born to talk this way -- he talks this way in all his movies -- which is no doubt why he was elected (or appointed, or whatever) village elder in chief (or school headmaster, or something).
Howard, making her movie debut, has enough charm to make her way through some of the script's sillier lines. "Do you find me too much of a tomboy?" she asks the moody Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix), but not much more.
Indeed, the whole village seems to be possessed by barely suppressed yearnings and guilty secrets. These, more than the beasts in the woods, might have been the subject of an interesting, Hardyesque inquiry into small-town life, but Shyamalan once again uses the psychology of his characters as the ultimate red herring, fooling us into caring more about the people in the movie than he does.
He does, at least, care about the way his movies look, and his disdain for newfangled special effects is refreshing. His mastery of classic suspense-movie framing and cutting is as impressive as ever, and the sound design, which layers James Newton Howard's spooky score with the equally sinister sounds of the forest, is impressive, especially when it evokes Ivy's blindness. At times you do sit up in your chair and crane your neck, as if you could see around the next bend of the story and glimpse what's coming. Then you do see it, and you burst out laughing.
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