let's twist again!

Rating: 9/10 (3 August 2004)

You know you're well on your way to becoming a filmmaker of serious note when your films start to become either passionately loved or hideously reviled. Judging from what I've been reading of late, M. Night Shyamalan has definitely gotten into that league with his new film The Village.
This is a brilliant film that works as both an allegory and as an actual story, with characters you care about. It's brilliant because Night manages to take a really tricky plot and execute it with dazzling clarity of vision. The thing I liked most about it was how I was expecting it to be a different kind of movie - this is what Night wanted us to expect, so we'd be caught off guard by what the film actually is about. A lot of people (including some very vocal ones at the Arclight in Hollywood, where I saw the film last Saturday) were bent out of shape by this, whining that Shyamalan 'misled and tricked' them. To these people, I offer three words: GRIP. GET ONE. If the film had been what they had been set up to expect, these same people would have been carping that it was predictable.
What I recommend: don't read reviews (you can stop right here with this one, if you want). Don't listen to people who've seen it. Just go check it out for yourself. If you're looking for an original, thought-provoking movie that will leave you with goosebumps (but not for any of the reasons you might expect), you can't go wrong with The Village.