Undoubtedly, Shyamalan's magic touch has worn off (SPOILERS)

Rating: 1/10 (16 March 2005)

*WARNING: This review contains spoilers that reveal the movie's "big" twist*
Was the twist for 1999's "The Sixth Sense" that much of a shocker that people would ignore the other problems with the film? Admittedly, "Unbreakable" and "Signs" were a lot better in comparison, but still weren't anywhere near classics. Then Shyamalan goes and makes "The Village", a movie so pointless and dull it makes me wonder if Ed Wood was really all that bad. At least his films are entertaining.
In my opinion, Shyamalan is an overrated hack whose reputation far exceeds his actual talents as a director. Sure, he clearly loves movies and has a knack of making his films appear more frightening than they really are through marketing, but he fails in creating an actual atmosphere for his individual projects. Even the standard "boo!" moments associated with horror films aren't effective; the set-up is there, but the pacing is off. Viewed a second time, these scenes come off worst because the audience can think about the plot holes. Two such scenes are when the monsters attack the village for the first time and the scene where the protagonist, Ivy (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) has a confrontation with a monster.
Regardless, the movie actually does have a decent premise: the citizens of a mysterious, late nineteenth-century village supposedly have a truce with demonic beings that live in the woods surrounding the town. As long as the townspeople stay away from the woods, the creatures would leave them alone. Unfortunately, some children venture into the forest, thereby breaking the truce and angering the monsters. Soon after the creatures attack the village as punishment, one of the villagers, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix), is critically injured and Ivy has to go out in search of medicine that can save him. Her quest is impeded with the fact that she is blind and because of her attraction to Lucius.
All this unfolds at a ridiculously slow pace as Shyamalan sets up the characters and their situation. After developing this narrative for an hour and a half, Shyamalan, as expected, comes up with a twist: it's revealed that not only are there no monsters at all, but the villagers are in fact living in a present day park preserve. By this point, it is terribly obvious that Shyamalan is willing to do just about anything to catch the audience off guard, but this laughably absurd resolution is just too much. Why not just tell a straightforward drama about a few seniors fooling their offspring into living an Amish-like existence instead of trying to pawn the film off as a horror movie?
The answer to that question is actually quite simple: Shyamalan has the reputation of being a "thriller movie" director and he has to maintain this illusion; thus the pretext of "The Village" looking like a horror movie for most of the running length and it being marketed as such. Of course, this misguided approach destroys any chance of there being a rewatchability factor: why bother to see the movie again if we know that Noah (of all people), played by Adrien Brody, is the one who dresses up as a monster to keep the townspeople away from the woods? What is really the point of structuring an entire movie on one single plot twist?
Shyamalan also tries to build up tension in certain scenes, but he's no Hitchcock. His previous movies all had at least a couple of good scary moments, but everything here is just so dull it is hard for a viewer to get invested in the characters and their plight. Are we really supposed to care about some paper-thin villagers being chased down by anonymous monsters, especially when we know there are no monsters at all? The director simply cannot create enough suspense for the movie to work even the first time around. Shyamalan's best effort, "Unbreakable", doesn't try to fool the audience into thinking it's a horror movie; it works on it's own and not by playing on the audiences' expectations.
Of course, among the mess of a narrative, there are nonetheless a few bright spots. James Newton Howard delivers a haunting score that adjusts to whatever the movie is pretending to be at that moment. Roger Deakins' cinematography is wonderful and it at least gives us something to look at while we're being bored out of our skulls. Finally, while Shyamalan's reputation seems only to get worse with every proceeding film he makes, he still manages to attract a rather good cast, which includes Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, and Brendan Gleeson. All of these actors manage to rise above the material, but they cannot save the movie.
"The Village" is no doubt one of the most uneven and lifeless films of recent times. It was painfully clear in 2004 that Shyamalan was way past his "best by" date, yet he has gone on to make two more atrocities: 2006's "Lady in the Water" and 2008's "The Happening". These three films, taken together, confirm one thing: that M. Night Shyamalan has no business making movies and should seriously consider pursuing other ventures; anything to spare movie audiences from having to bear another one of his catastrophes. 1/10