Shyamalan's Best Premise But....

Rating: Null/10 (19 January 2005)

Whatever Night Shyamalan paid Bryce Dallas Howard for her work in this film it is not enough. Just as he landed Haley Joel Osment in Sixth Sense so he has SCORED with this young lady. Not only did her character and charisma dominate this film but she almost single-handedly saved it....ALMOST. Don't get me wrong, Shyamalan's premise is as always fascinating - and this is perhaps his finest - with his signature twist ending truly flooring BUT to get us there he struggled tremendously. The whole rickety, precarious structure of the film began to fall over a couple of times and Night had to toss the audience a bone each time in order to try to keep us on his wave-length I think. In other words this film much more than his previous ones was very obviously "written backwards" from the twist and then filled in frantically in order to make a story. As a whole cohesive story it just falls short. It was really close here but I don't think as a whole the film survives. Does not mean that it did not have some truly memorable images, though, and again I can't say enough about Bryce Howard.