Almost as bad as Lady in the Water

Rating: 3/10 (25 June 2008)

There have been a plethora of opinions espoused about The Village. Some positive, some negative, and some very ambivalent. There are those that love this film and others call it the antithesis to what made Shyamalan famous revered by critics and film lovers.
The difficulty in reviewing a film like The Village is that there is an incredibly fine line between reviewing the film in terms of how well it was made and reviewing the film in terms of how utterly contemptible it is towards it's target audience. The first question you have to ask yourself is if this is a well-made film? Sure, it is competently made, it is well acted and it is scored nicely. If you look at it that way, then The Village is a well-made film. But if what you are looking for in a film is something more sophisticated and shrewd from a man like Shyamalan, then The Village is an abomination. It is nothing but a charlatan that when viewing the film I thought I mistakenly heard Shyamalan was the man behind this film. To cut to the chase, this is one of the worst films of 2004 only being surpassed thus far by the universally accepted fetidness of Catwoman. The Village in some ways is worse than Catwoman because it tricks you into believing that you are about to see one movie when you are really in store for another. The Village goes into new depths of purgatory from a marketing standpoint. When filmmakers and studios can lie to you about what you are to see, then we have reached a new low in the art and business of film. I didn't go into Alien vs. Predator expecting to see a story about aristocracy of Old England and I didn't go into The Village expecting to see nothing but a nostrum of monumental proportions. While Catwoman is a poorly made film by a man with one name, The Village is almost worse because Shyamalan is synonymous with the pinnacle of the craft. Regrettably, The Village is nowhere near brilliant. Sadly, it's almost at the other end of the axis. The Village is terrible.
The Village begins with the townsfolk attending a funeral of one of the young boys of The Village. He was seven years old and by the engraving on his gravestone, we can see that the film takes place in the very late 1800's. The Villagers are a very simple and peaceful people and they keep to themselves. They refute any outside influence and have chosen to live in seclusion. This seems to work for them and the nearest town is miles away. They farm, they dance, and they live in a harmonious concord . But of course there is one problem; the uneasy truce they have with the entities in the woods. There has been an ostensible truce between the villagers and the entities in the woods for years and their kinds do not mix. The villagers stay out of the woods and the entities stay out of the village. There are certain precautions that must be taken by the villagers that include a watchtower that is occupied at night and the color red must never be seen by the entities in the woods as it apparently attracts and angers the woodsmen.
Harmony is omnipotent in the village until suddenly animals are found skinned and when one of the villagers has gone into the woods. The village's remuneration for their pretentious and defying act is a midnight visit by the beasts. Everyone runs for cover and this is the one and only moment of laconic tension. By this point in the film, it has crawled along at a snail's pace and we are ripe for some Carpenteresque type of tension. When this finally transpires, we think that the film is ready to take us into the realm of ambiguity that consistently graces Shyamalan's films. But what transpires next is a mendaciously misleading series of events that can do nothing to disguise the machination that Shyamalan set out with in the first place. We thought were walking into a horror film that would make the hair stand on the back of your neck, the way Sixth Sense did and the way that Signs did sporadically. But what we get instead is nothing but a quack job that cons us out of our money.
Shyamalan is synonymous with "twist endings". To borrow a line from Spiderman, that is his gift to us and also his curse. With great power comes great responsibility and Night has abused that power. He might have had noble intentions when he wrote this film as many have discussed the symbolism of the red flags and bad colors and the implied danger inherent in this film, and if that is what you enjoy, a subliminal film that lectures us and works as a parable, then by all means, pay your ten bucks and go see this film. But if you were hoping to be enthralled by an ostensible master of modern suspense and horror, then you are going to be disappointed. Shyamalan has given us nothing but an amateurish picture so engrossed in sanctimonious and implied admonitions that he forgot to make the film entertaining and suspenseful. The Village is one of the most absurd films loaded with esoterica and it is ultimately a colossal failure. The "twist" in the film produced gales of laughter from the theater I was in and it carried over as the audience left the theater. For a sheer waste of money, see The Village. For a film that had such pedigree to it, it is one of the all time disappointments. The Village takes several steps back for a man of Shyamalan's stature and reputation. Let's hope the next M. Night Shyamalan film is better than the last two because his statute of limitations on creating disappointing films just dropped significantly.
3/10