One Of My Favourite Movies

Rating: 10/10 (1 October 2012)

For me, the village is the best movie directed and written by Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense and Lady in The water come after this one) and the best movie i've seen in the 2000's (coupled with Mulholland Drive) and i've seen more of 1200 movies, came out between 2000 and 2009.
The first time i saw The Village i loved all of it. The incredible cast (Bryce Dallas Howard is powerfully moving and a very talented beautiful actress), the perfect visual direction, classic but so perfectionist in the choice of what to film or not (the moving scene of the first kiss between Lucius and Ivy and that image of an empty chair to leave the characters in their privacy...), the powerful and heady score by James Newton Howard, the gorgeous photography by roger deakins and finally the great script.
What is the most powerful thing for a studio picture, made for large audiences, is the fact that The Village is a parable. A lot of people didn't get that fact when the movie came out.
It's a melancholic drama about fear and how good people, hurt by the violence of our modern societies, became awful people, controlling others with fear, in order to find again an innocence in the past that never existed. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And the irony the elders understood at the end of the picture is that violence or cruelty is everywhere in every one of us and a simple minded supposed to be innocent without violence in his bones will be the first to break their illusions.
A great parable about our troubled world at that time (Irak's War, 9/11...). Signs was the previous movie of Shyamalan who started filming after the 9/11 and it devastated the crew when filming. We can see in this previous movie the shadow of that period (the isolation, the brutality against aliens) so his next movie would be more explicit about those troubled times. Here come the village. What is admirable too is the fact that Shyamalan never judged his characters. Everyone has a motivation and human flaws.
All the powerful lines, moments... Ahhh The Village... I never understood why so much people hated it when it first came out. Even though many people didn't like it the movie had great success at the box office. I didn't expect people to hate Lady in the water too !
10/10