Mysteries as They Should Be

Rating: 8/10 (12 September 2004)

A panoply of eccentric characters. A nexus of befuddling events. A 19 th Century hamlet living on borrowed time, encased in fragile borders courting disaster at every turn. A perfect vehicle for the infamous Shyamalan bandwagon to re-roll itself back into the limelight, with the fabled writer-producer-director's possibly best-accomplished project yet.
The Village takes place in a cordoned-off community deep in the woods somewhere, and defies spoilage-free critique. Its residents face a seldom spoken-of enemy fielding indefinable properties, and emanating from the bleak foliage all around them. While within the fortified village a lively decorum takes precedence over inevitable desperation, brewing sentiments hint at a boiling point just as compellingly unavoidable as the horrors lurking all around.
Reminiscent of The Blair Witch, Sleepy Hollow and The 13th Warrior in a few important, albeit not critical ways, The Village dishes out superb suspense with a colossal twist in its prickly tail. Devoid of redundancies such as computer graphics, Shyamalan's latest relies on red herrings and subtle innuendo rather than cleverer-than-thou hints and foreshadows, allowing its ample cast freedom of performance within certain limits. A few, like Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleeson, do ably enough but leave little to write about. Others thrive on the story, like excellent Joaquin Phoenix as suspecting introvert Lucius Hunt, William Hurt as Village elder and mentor Edward Walker, and Adrien Brody as the bumbling local idiot.
Stemming from its sadly short runtime, The Village hardly ever lingers, pausing briefly to touch upon loving exchanges between Lucius and intelligent observer Ivy Walker, done by Bryce Dallas Howard, Ron Howard's daughter. Instead of spreading itself too thin, the movie brilliantly stays close to its core attraction, all the time teasing audiences with near-revelations and stretching everything till the very last minute, when the oddball conclusion become unavoidable.
There may be those decrying The Village's dearth of bombastic screen writing idealization and low-end production values (where they managed to bury $60 million remains to be found), but as a spooky creepy crawler big on brains it operates smoothly and with no major glitches at all. Make no mistake, while not strictly horror, The Village delivers tensions stressful enough to register with viewers like a spindly, electric headache coming out of nowhere, and its uniquely bewildering intimidation guarantees it an honorary perch among recent cinematic mind-benders.
Rating: * * * *