"The Village" has the clues without the mystery

Rating: 5/10 (13 May 2005)

"The Village" comes from a long line of critically acclaimed M. Night Shyamalan films, so naturally the expectations are high for this latest offering. I'd like to say it measured up, but the only word I can honestly use to describe this film is "disappointment". The movie may be a victim of Shyamalan's own success, causing audiences to draw comparisons between "The Village" and his other films (like "The Sixth Sense"). More troublesome though, I think, is the misleading advertising which may have led some of us to believe "The Village" is a horror/suspense film  it's not.
"The Village" is set in the late 1800s in a small village called Covington. Covington is isolated from the rest of civilization, as it is completely surrounded by woods. These woods are home to things so terrible, so horrifying, that the villagers of Covington can only refer to them as "those we do not speak of". And it is these "creatures" that keep the villagers in Covington after all these years, their fears amplified by the stories the village elders tell them.
While that may sound like a set-up for a great horror movie, or even an intense suspense thriller, it's really neither. Instead, in the first two thirds of the movie we are presented with a bizarre love triangle, which may be interesting on some level, if that is what we had come for. There are a few small thrills in between the slow, plodding atmospheric sequences with little-to-no interesting development among the characters and plot. It's almost as if while writing the script, Shyamalan completed the ending first, and worked backward, trying desperately to fill time until the movie could reach its rather anti-climatic end. The few twists the movie presents along the way could only surprise a very unperceptive viewer  perhaps one who made several trips to the bathroom during the film.
I suppose in its own right, "The Village" is a vaguely entertaining film, and I can certainly appreciate it for its foreshadowing (although it's hardly needed considering how obvious the ending is by the halfway point). I always love a mystery that gives you the clues along the way so you can solve the mystery yourself if you are perceptive enough. The Village got that right, now if only the mystery was stronger.