Not Bad, But Poorly Marketed

Rating: 7/10 (18 December 2004)

M. Night's "The Village" is certainly not a horror film. It's not even really much of a thriller. The film is, at its core, a love story. Played out against a Quaker-esquire rural community, the story revolves around a young blind woman, her boyfriend, and her mentally-challenged and very jealous admirer. Through a sordid series of misguided actions, the three are thrown into a somewhat twisted tale of courage, love, and revenge.
Unfortunately, this was not the film that was advertised. The trailers and movie posters offered us a sort of psychologically driven monster movie-- and that's not what we got. Many fans of M. Night and critics in general felt slighted. This was not the movie that they paid to see.
While it's certainly not a brilliant piece of film-making and, aside from a great performance from Howard in the lead, offers just mediocre acting, it's not nearly as bad a film as many are saying. An open mind and fewer expectations (of genre, not of quality) on behalf of the viewers could have made this a bigger success.
Alas, however, the marketing people did what they did, the viewers expected what they expected, and the critics wrote what they wrote, and this is what we got: A decent movie that was treated like a horrible movie. 7/10