M Night the gatekeeper

Rating: Null/10 (2 August 2004)

I didn't see any previews or know much about the movie when I saw it last night. I thought it was superb. The multiple twists in the plot are expected by now, that's just a little bonus logic game M Night wants to play with the audience. It's fun.
(spoilers ahead!)
For the first twenty minutes or so I was struck by M Night's ability to convey as much drama as possible in such a restricted setting. When all actors are so confined in their mannerisms and emotion, every little thing that does get through counts, it speaks volumes. Well done. I was also amused by being so wrong in my initial criticism of the dialogue and delivery. I thought these actors were not trying too hard to slip into a 19th century style. Some sentence constructions were so forced into the bygone style of speaking, it was getting humorous. How wrong I was though. This director can easily be underestimated. Just wait till the end, he always seems to say.
By the end of it we see how a group of people will go through so much effort to construct a fantasy world as a response to their despair over the real world. M night may even perhaps be self-referencing here, with the quirky temptation of the filmmaker who wants to make his movie and fantasize about living in that world he has constructed, a world where every mystical occurrence has very naturalistic explanations (the explanations which can be delayed for a very long time, the important thing is to captivate the audience by their own imaginations), and most importantly that there is always finality after tragedy in an M Night kind of way. Our cameo appearance of the director this time is indirectly given only as the voice of the manager of security and a thin reflection on a fragile glass surface. Behind his image, a stockpile of medicine. I wonder why? Is the Walker Preserve M Night's self-contained world of a film, and his job as creator/director in part is to simply keep things running smooth and not let the outside world interfere with his project? He himself is the gatekeeper to the well being of his characters lives and so on? It can after all be a very stressful experience, keeping all that in order.Digressing.
But the very thing the people wished to escape from had risen up in their very midst, among their very own offspring. Such a failure was bound to happen because their entire fantasy was founded on secrets and lies. Curiosity and feelings of betrayal lead to unexpected reactions, the presumption of innocence itself was a lie. Suffering so much loss in the "survival of the fittest" world that modernism had borne inspired a history professor to head up a new colony to start afresh under the very same principles which modernism in part started with. Man living in perfect unity within a Utopian environment. The Puritan/Mennonite/Amish world was just a mode to operate under, what perhaps 20th century folk might start to consider the "noble savage" in their simplistic and naive forms of living. But they do find that purity itself was a constructed illusion. By deciding to remove themselves from the surrounding evils of the world, they thought this would eradicate the existence of evil in their midst because their motives were "pure". But what really mattered were the same things that matter in the rest of the big bad world... courage, wisdom, love. Innocence is a fantasy, only doing good is what counts. And doing good is what is done in response to surrounding evil, not in the absence of evil.
Overall beautiful movie. The real "horror" in this movie was their seeming final agreement to preserve their microcosm after all that had transpired.