A decent story, just badly told

Rating: 5/10 (16 February 2005)

I suppose it would seem like jumping on the anti-Shyamalan bandwagon if I started by asserting just how thin his whole 'chilling tale with a major twist at the end' routine is wearing. Either way, I'm going to have to agree. It's wearing incredibly thin, so much so that even 'the Village' seems to exhibit signs of self-awareness that whatever shocking big surprise Shyamalan may have up his sleeve on this occasion is all his viewers really came here to see. By now, a twist's to be expected with his films, so that novelty's pretty much done with, and 'the Village' doesn't even try to kid us on that one. It knows full well that we know full well that it's working it's way up to a surprise of some form or other, and tries, unsuccessfully, to stay one step ahead of us by using our expectations to its advantage. And trusting that self-conscious instinct is the single worst mistake this movie makes - its top priority soon becomes to keep on reversing our assumptions as much as possible over whatever form this particular bombshell will take, at the expense of just about everything else needed to bring it together as a movie. All 'the Village' really does is present us with a scenario and suggest so many different possibilities that the whole thing soon spirals into more of an elaborate guessing game than anything else - the story and rather insipid cast of characters are little more than ciphers to this scenario, and it almost willingly sacrifices its chances of being taken seriously as a film very early on in the run.
I don't know about everyone else, but the moment I personally stopped taking 'the Village' seriously was when they suddenly decided to break the eerie tension and give us glimpse of one these things that the villagers themselves 'do not speak of'. Up until then, the ways in which it built up angst in the earlier scenes could actually be very absorbing (also terribly clichéd at times too - red is the 'bad colour'? sigh...). So long as the threatening forces go unseen, we have no idea what the villagers are really dealing with any more than they seemingly do. We share their uncertainty, are kept in the dark as much as they are, which gives us a deeper connection with the characters and makes it all the more effective. Then when one of these monsters actually loams into view, with the villagers all fleeing in terror from it, I honestly couldn't bring myself to view it as anything more than a man dressed up in a silly costume. And, low and behold - a little later on in the film we discover that it really is, in fact, a man dressed up in a silly costume, but by that point the potential chills were long since dead, and the revelation came more as whimsical irony than anything too shocking.
It's from then on that the pacing becomes tiring and off-putting, the diversions feel forced and the screenplay's attempts to frighten us, in context with everything else, seem strangely awkward. To be fair, I didn't actually manage to guess the final revelation, no matter how obvious everyone else tells me it was, so it still came as quite a pleasant little surprise, but the previous 100 minutes or so's worth of build-up was far too lightweight for it to have any proper punch. Characterisation is second banana to these plot devices, which doesn't help things - the residents of this village are generally bland and underdeveloped, and only detract from whatever rewatch-ability value the film might have had. It's particularly strange that the script never really attempts to explain why Noah, the mentally backward kid, should turn into such a malevolent rebel - they just seem to assume that his drooling, laughing at inappropriate moments and stereotypically bad social skills will be explanation enough, which it isn't.
The irony is, through such a vicious onslaught of flaws, 'the Village' does glow with potential, and I have a feeling that if he wasn't so caught up in trying to surprise us and gave those merits a little more elbow-room, Shyamalan might finally have had something on his hands to have rivalled 'the Sixth Sense'. The direction itself shows a lot of flair and promise, the basic storyline is haunting, quirky and intriguing enough to hold the viewer's attention throughout, and, above everything, it does manage to touch upon some potentially very powerful moral issues regarding human nature. As the narrative questions, just how much of our innocence have we really lost in our modern times, when things like hatred and violence have existed all throughout history? This just cries out to be the true focus of the movie and, if it were so, then 'the Village' might have ended up with a lot more depth and meaning than the end result. Too bad then that Shyamalan isn't nearly as interested in the social implications of his film as he is in playing that damned game of 'Guess the Twist Ending'.
Grade: C