Dissing the Twist Misses the Point

Rating: 10/10 (24 March 2010)

I think this film has been given a bad rap by people who judge it based on the quality of his trademark "twist" at the end. Was I able to anticipate it before it was revealed? Yes. But that's not the point. For my tastes, this film speaks to one of my favorite themes in movies like Dark City or The Matrix, namely that no matter what the appearance of the world you're seeing, that appearance is an illusion.
The movie asks us to consider in its microcosm the bigger question about the validity and reality of the world we inhabit. There's a metaphysical movement that is gaining momentum in these times about how much of what passes for "common sense" and the nature of reality is not nearly as true as we suppose it to be. What we've been learning at the leading edges of sciences like quantum mechanics and epigenetics is that many of the dominant ideas about how our world works are merely illusions beneath which a more nuanced and surprising circumstance waits to be discovered.
Our world is not what most of us have been taught it is. And films like The Village pose a simple but very important question, namely "Is what we think the truth of things are really the truth at all?"