It did not work for me.

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2004)

First of all I'm not a Shy fan. I like his movies so don't get me wrong about that. I'm not a "fan". I don't rise to his defense when someone doesn't care for one of his movies and I don't watch them over and over again studying his (admittedly impressive) style. I just like the movies.
And yes I'm going to spoiler-land so if you don't want to read any then skip my review.
This one I didn't care for in the least. It's a story with nothing much going on. Sure there are "those we don't speak of" but you don't believe in them from almost the first ten minutes of the film. Nothing engages you or draws you in. It just plods on and on towards the ending that you guessed before you even got your Goobers open.
The cast is wooden and stiff and the way they crawl through their scenes keeps you from caring. The movie looks awesome but you grow tired of looking at the valley and the village after a while. It's filmed beautifully but it just sits there doing nothing. People do nothing, the "others" do nothing, the village elders do nothing. Nothing happens that makes you care about this. Phoenix spends the entire movie speaking like the village idiot. In fact the real village idiot is more interesting than Phoenix. Hurt, Weaver, and the rest of the cast act like bad animatronics. Pretty much every single CGI character in the short history off CGI characters is more alive than anyone in this picture.
You know what? This movie left me so "empty" that I can't continue to try and write a detailed review of it. I'm going for short and sweet instead.
Looks pretty, watches like paint drying, the ending falls flat, and it's time for Shyamalan to get a new gimmick. The "tricky ending" thingy don't work anymore. He's better than this and in my opinion he needs to try to consciously not make a "Shyamalan movie". Just go find a good script and drop the whole spooky-artsy pretense.