So Many Good Ideas... So Little Execution

Rating: 5/10 (23 December 2004)

Yes, this film was marketed poorly. Yes, the trailers were misguided. But yes, this is also not a very good film.
The problem is that Night has introduced too many concepts, ideas and sub-plots with not enough time to fully realize any of them. The casting is wonderful; Hurt does his best "intellectual every man", Phoenix is a decently stoic enigma and newcomer Bryce is actually fantastic as the lead. But Sigourney Weaver is given little to do and some difficult, mundane dialogue to act her way through. Brendan Gleeson is inexcusably underused and Adrien Brody seems to have been edited out of any real emotional impact.
What this film wants to be is a comment on contemporary America - where a group of intellectuals (with the funding of one very wealthy family), disenfranchised with modern street violence and urban decay, could conceivably remove themselves from the modern world and live in the perceived utopia of a rural 19th century. But too many easy answers, tacked on script "quick fixes", and multiple convenient solutions expose the many holes in the film making. It always feels like Night was tacking on justification scenes as the film posed questions instead of having a clear vision at the script stage. I won't go into all of the examples - but there are many (costumes hidden under floorboards, a blind girl, a mentally challenged man who can't expose the truth of the woods, a clearly quick-fix line about someone paying off the government to not fly over the commune, etc). You never get the sense that Brody is in love enough to kill. You never really fear the "woods", you are never really forced to wonder what is in the boxes in the elders' homes, and the creatures should never have been shown (first rule of mis-direction-based suspense!). I'll offer this one question as an example indicative of the other problematic elements: Why - if the "elders" know that it is really not the 1800's, and also know that they are living in a protected area set up by the Walker family - do they make such a fuss about Ivy going for medicine? They know what she will find but not be able to see. Unlike Night's previous films, the mystery is not guarded in a realistic way. He makes these elders seem suspicious and mysterious solely for the benefit of the audience, but there is no real justification for the characters themselves. This is troubling throughout the film and ends up like most badly written suspense films where the twists only trick the viewer but seem ridiculous and improbable if you just deal with the fictional world contained in the film.
All in all, it's overly-simplistic; the equivalent of the "it was all a dream" device. While I was not disappointed that this film was not the horror thrill ride that the trailers would have you believe, I was disappointed that a clever idea was so badly edited together (it looks like hours of footage was shot, but slashed down to its essential plot points for time) and never realized. It's a shame, it could have been a great film if Night would have stuck to a couple fully developed characters and plot paths and really got us to invest in them.