better than advertised

Rating: 7/10 (22 August 2005)

Though it's sure not to be everyone's cup of tea, M Night Shyamalan's "The Village" plays like a good old-fashioned "Twilight Zone" episode all done up in period costume and expanded out to feature film length.
Set in the late 1800's, the story - which plays like a cross between "The Crucible" and "The Blair Witch Project" - takes place in a small village that has been cut off from the outside world by strange and potentially deadly creatures who inhabit the woods nearby. These mysterious figures - referred to by the townsfolk as Those We Don't Speak Of - have made some sort of pact with the humans to the effect that they will leave the people alone if the people leave them alone. However, one individual in the town - a young man named Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) - has an aching desire to leave the village and explore the world beyond the parameters of the woods. It is that unprecedented willingness to cross the barrier and violate the pact that sets the story in motion.
"The Village" is obviously intended to be an allegory about how humans use fear of the unknown to keep themselves from venturing out to worlds beyond their own, and, concomitantly, to justify hiding from the ugliness of life. The film has the stripped-down look and feel of a morality play performed on a stage whose sets are simple and stark and whose characters and dialogue are weighted down with heavy symbolic value. "The Village" requires patience from the audience and an acceptance going into the film that this will not be a horror movie in the traditional sense - i.e. one filled with gore and grue or high-octane chills and thrills - but rather a subdued exercise in portentousness and understated suggestion. In this respect, the movie works quite well.
Heavily reliant as it is on imagery and mood to achieve its effects, this is less an actor's film that it is a director's, but Phoenix, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver and Adrien Brody as the literal village idiot, deliver reasonably compelling performances. But it is Bryce Dallas Howard, as a young blind woman sent into the forest on a danger-filled mission to bring help back from town, who shines in the film.
Shyamalan has made quite a lucrative career out of movies that use indirection rather than explicitness to generate their suspense. That "The Village" is the weakest of those films thus far ("The Sixth Sense" and "Signs" are more fully realized works), doesn't diminish the fact that those willing to give it a chance may find it to be a rewarding experience.