Shown To Believe

Rating: 8/10 (27 February 2005)

M. Night Shyamalan is well known for his ability to invoke suspense and surprise endings. This film keeps with his other works such as "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable". But much like those films, it is also designed to make you look at things a certain way. The surprise endings that are often unguessable are due to Shyamalan's cleverness in making the audience see things from a staged point of view without even realizing it. This is the very reason none of us knew Bruce Willis was a ghost in "The Sixth Sense". "The Village" can easily be summarized as a community that is haunted by some darkness in the surrounding woods. The details of such take us to a place that appears remote and colonial. All of this becomes apparent in the natives' dress and their speech. Communication and transportation are primitive and farming represents the town's livelihood. The audience at this point has a very clear sense that they are watching an older, bygone way of life.
Now, about the darkness...there are creatures that lurk in the nearby woods. A relationship exists between the creatures and the townspeople, where the townsfolk stay out of the woods and the creatures leave them be. Not surprising, this "truce" is broken and the creatures start to pay little visits. At this point you feel like you are watching an old-world, horror-type film. Good camera work, a good cast (includes Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, and Joaquin Phoenix), and excellent suspense make this an interesting tale. Everything is amplified when one of the community members is stabbed and needs medicine. Then the story begins to involve how the community has sequestered itself from the outside world and is haunted by the forest creatures.
Where things get a bit shaky is in the whole idea for the film. Please do not read on if you don't wish to know the ending. The ending reveals that the "portrayed town" we've been watching is actually the creation of a bunch of city goers in today's world that wanted to start their own society. While a most clever idea, retrospect shows that the way the town operated, you would think someone would have found out the truth already. And the town certainly wasn't that old, with the first generation members being William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver. How did they manage to move and create a colony and then turn around and invent myths that were law? And the fact that all the town elders were cowards enough to send a blind girl to get medicine was just plain sad. Did they know that if they sent a blind girl, they would remain undiscovered? And to think the whole thing was justified by the injustices they experienced in the modern world. Kudos to William Hurt for his performance in showing how the elders were committing their own injustices. Anybody think the town held together and there'll be a Village 2? 8/10 P.S.: An excellent job is done in the woods scene with Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard's daughter), where you begin to think the monsters might actually be real.