The Village

(M. Night Shyamalan, USA, 2004)

It is among the great legends of film history that Alfred Hitchcock sometimes used to present his scriptwriters with a couple of key, spectacular scenes, already fully worked out. Then he would instruct them to invent all the more ordinary plot stuff needed to connect these high points.

M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, 1999) seems to proceed in a similar fashion, even though in this case the director and the writer (and also the producer) are the same person. The twist or revelation is everything to him. Once he has that spectacular, Twilight Zone-style switcheroo fixed in his head, it would appear that he works backward, figuring out the narrative that will allow him to reach this moment.

In Shyamalan's latest and most ponderous film, The Village, this creative process has seriously misfired. When the twist comes, it is meant to make the audience reflect back on everything it has hitherto seen and heard, recasting its significance. Instead, this audience is more likely to become mired in confusion or outright irritation.

There will be no spoilers in this review, but it can safely be said that The Village is an ambitious film essentially about the nature of a social community. The inhabitants of a nineteenth-century village live by a strict code of what is allowed and what is forbidden. The village perimeters are rigidly demarcated, and no one is allowed to venture beyond them – lest "those we don't speak of", a race of monstrous and murderous creatures, decide to get heavy.

This is clearly a movie about the deleterious effects of repression and isolationism – and those favourably disposed towards Shyamalan will readily interpret it as an allegory for the American condition in the era of the War Against Terror. The story begins at the moment when this fragile social order is beginning to break down. Noah (Adrien Brody) is becoming increasingly deranged and violent. The chief elder, Edward (William Hurt) grows graver when sickness and injury expose the village's lack of medical supplies. And every morning, the gruesome handiwork of the creatures from the outside world is evident.

At the centre of this tortuous tale is Edward's blind, young daughter, Ivy – a feisty, intense character who brings something different to Shyamalan's universe, and is superbly played by newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of Ron Howard). It will be – rather incredibly – up to Ivy to venture forth into the woods and try to save this ailing community.

Fairy tale, allegory, symbolic drama, abstract horror movie – the only thing The Village lacks is the slightest dose of grounded reality. I do not mean this in terms of strict plot logic, since many fine films (you can start right at the top with Vertigo [1958]) are gleefully illogical. But it is virtually impossible to become involved in a movie where the characters are such bloodless ciphers, and the daily life of the community can scarcely be believed.

Shyamalan's attention as a director is scattered and uneven. Remarkable images in the mode of Carl Dreyer or Terrence Malick – such as the choreography of women sweeping a porch and discovering a forbidden red flower, or the almost avant-garde effects of blurry figures in almost total darkness – never coalesce into an overall, coherent style.

Every good performance (by, for instance, Sigourney Weaver) is outweighed by three clunky ones (from Brody, Joaquin Phoenix and Michael Pitt). Too often, the entire cast is reduced to furtive glancing off-screen as spooky creatures howl in the distance, while the overwrought sound effects try to whip up a tension generally missing from proceedings. And the deliberately stylised dialogue is awfully stilted and alienating.

Shyamalan is in a continuum of American filmmakers, from Victor Salva at the trash-genre end to Steven Spielberg at the quality-blockbuster end, who combine a firm sense of storytelling and audience-manipulation crafted with a fistful of naïve, not-quite thought-out, yet compelling personal obsessions.

Shyamalan's particular obsession revolves around the fraught relations between seeing and believing – an inherently cinematic problem. Alongside the mystical visions and optical trickery familiar from his previous films, The Village adds in the complicating motif of blindness.

The result should have been disquieting and intoxicating, but everything here is so contrived, leaden and solemn that the movie disappears into its own black hole of night.

© Adrian Martin September 2004