SPOILER WARNING!! DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT!

Rating: 6/10 (20 August 2004)

Positives: The scenery was beautiful. The village layout, buildings, etc., were extremely well done--very beautiful. The bizarro violin music was very well done. In terms of cinematography and such, this was a very well-crafted film.
My wife and I saw this film in an almost empty theatre on August 19--very unusual since the Megaplex where we went is usually packed out! I think it was a commentary on this film!
Around 15 minutes into this film, and not knowing what the film was about, my wife leaned over to me and said, "now watch, the twist is probably something like it's really modern times, and this village is really next to a freeway or something." Although I I wasn't sure that she was right, I kept waiting in the film to see how the "twist" would be executed. Since our first sighting of the "monsters" was so obvious that "they" were just people dressed in red capes with stuff on them, I thought that maybe the twist would be that, although the "monsters" were fake,there would actually turn out to be real monsters. I had hoped for something more imaginative than what my wife suggested, and was a bit disappointed when she was basically right.
I was confused though. The photo showed all of the "elders" standing in 70's-era clothes in front of a "Counseling Center." Were they all mental patients? Were they the counselors? Were they criminals who themselves killed all the people mentioned on the voice-over when they went through whom in their families were dead and how they died?
My first comment when the end credits suddenly started rolling was, "That's it?" I left the theatre feeling a bit disappointed. This film was definitely not as good overall as The Sixth Sense.