This movie is not a horror movie

Rating: 7/10 (13 February 2005)

This movie is not a horror movie--it's an allegory about control versus liberty and innocence versus amorality. It's closer to *The Truman Show* than it is to any horror movie. New Urbanism, indeed. At first I thought the death of Noah at Ivy's hand was some kind of justice, but I eventually saw that it was in fact the death of an innocent, not at the hand of particular criminal, but as a consequence of the corruption innate in the premise of the Village. William Hurt's character's fundamental deviousness and duplicity is demonstrated in his choice to send the blind girl out to see the real world--she was the only who got leave and return without being immediately transformed. I wish this movie had a part two and three, because I have no doubt that a slow revelation of the truth is at hand. The story of the Village is incomplete, and that's what was frustrating to me, not the infamously unsatisfying reveal at the end. A fascinating cautionary tale.