The Village

I'm inclined to agree with Fiend's assessment that The Village is not Shyamalan's best work. It starts out promisingly enough, with a village full of folks in 19th-century dress living in what appears to be splendid rural isolation -- splendid, that is, except for the lack of medical facilities which dooms the sick and injured to lingering, painful deaths, and the eerie, menacing, bestial howls that emanate from the surrounding forest. As the film begins, a child is buried beneath a gravestone bearing the date 1897. We find out, soon enough, that the village exists in isolation largely because of the threat posed by "Those We Do Not Speak Of", the inhabitants of the surrounding forest, whom the villagers ward away with watchtowers, torches, and prominent display of the "Safe Color". We are told that there is a truce by which the villagers stay out of the forest and "Those We Do Not Speak Of" stay out of the village. But how long will the truce last? And just what are the villagers trying to keep out, anyway?

I won't give away the Big Twist(TM) in the story, but it's there, and in retrospect, it creates holes in the plot and background of the film. For example, why the emphasis on the "Bad Color" and its effect on "Those We Do Not Speak Of"? Is this part of some grand metaphorical statement about the traditional cultural associations of said color, or is it just an excuse for the director to use sudden, bright splashes of it for dramatic visual effect? Should we also be thinking about the cultural associations of the "Safe Color"? Just how big an area is enclosed around the village and guarded by watchtowers, anyway? An agricultural life demands a lot of open space, and the raising of the livestock seen in the film would require even more open pastureland. What about that gravestone dated 1897, anyway?

Shyamalan doesn't quite play fair with the viewer all the time, either. (I have in mind particularly the sudden and previously-un-hinted-at revelation, at one point in the film, of a certain item having being kept under a certain set of floorboards for no plausible reason whatsoever.)

Walking into the theater, I wondered how Shyamalan would manage to make a movie set in the old-New-England territory of Lovecraft and Hawthorne without falling under the influence of those two giants. He managed to do so, but at the risk of introducing a plot twist that will have some viewers rolling their eyes, and at the risk of balancing a very heavily metaphorical story on a rather flimsy premise. Still, the movie's enjoyable, has some gorgeous photography and a few genuinely scareworthy moments, and will keep those who enjoy intellectual plot-puzzles guessing just what's going on through most of the picture.