Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 30, 2004, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
As usual for an M. Night Shyamalan film, it’s hard to go into too much depth about what does and doesn’t work in The Village without venturing into spoiler territory. So without giving any specifics away, or revealing in what order they arrive, it can be said that the writer/director pulls off one genuinely startling development, a reversal that feels rather like a cheat and a plot twist that opens up a large can of plausibility worms. It’s hard to know how hardcore genre fans will accept a couple of these story turns, and, once again, hard to explain why they might not without saying too much.
What can be said is that rather than focus on one protagonist confronting the unknown, here (as the title indicates) Shyamalan dramatizes an entire community’s reaction to the threat of mysterious forces. In this case, the woods surrounding a small town in the 1890s are the dwelling place of a race of beings with whom the villagers have negotiated a kind of truce—they stay out of the forest, and the creatures leave the humans alone.
The monsters are referred as “Those We Don’t Speak Of,” yet the townspeople do an awful lot of speaking about them, particularly their leader, schoolteacher Edward Walker (William Hurt). It is he who enforces the rules about staying within the town’s borders, but a few of the younger residents have started to chafe at that restriction, particularly Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix), whose mother Alice (Sigourney Weaver) seems to have an unrequited-love thing going with Walker.
I say “seems” because, like most of the characters and relationships in The Village, Walker and Alice’s would-be romance doesn’t get developed much past surface glances. In widening his focus, Shyamalan gives most of his sterling cast short shrift—not just Weaver but also fine supporting players like Brendan Gleeson (28 Days Later) and Cherry Jones.
Hurt radiates authority but sometimes sounds ill at ease with the self-consciously “period” dialogue, while Adrien Brody isn’t able to do much with his role as the, ahem, village idiot. The one cast standout—and she really does stand out—is Bryce Dallas “daughter of Ron” Howard as Ivy, Walker’s blind daughter. She brings equal parts sensitivity and strength to Ivy, whose burgeoning romance with Lucius (who, as played by Phoenix, is such a mope that it’s hard to figure out why both Ivy and her sister Kitty, played by Judy Greer, have the hots for him) leads her to share his desire to brave the woods and see what lies beyond.
More will not be said here about the storyline, except to note that the longer it goes on, the less involving it becomes. There are a few subtly creepy moments in the first half, but the movie hardly delivers the frights promised by the ads. More to the point, scaring the audience doesn’t seem to be Shyamalan’s ultimate point; the creatures are a McGuffin through which to examine his favorite theme, the reactions of people to threatening forces and what those responses reveal about human nature. The presence of too many characters thins the drama, however, and their behavior isn’t compelling enough to carry the film.
Narrowing the emphasis to Ivy in the second half promises to pay off in more sustained tension (and the movie might well have benefitted had she been the central protagonist throughout). Yet by the time that happens, Shyamalan has few cards left to play save his final reveal, which comes off more like a gimmick than a logical extension of what has been established. Speaking of gimmicks, Shyamalan even manages to sneak in his own traditional cameo along the way, giving it a directorial emphasis that has nothing to do with the tone of the scene and thus distractingly calls attention to itself.
What becomes clear in The Village’s final sections is that here, Shyamalan has let his plot twists define the movie instead of serve them. The Sixth Sense’s revelation worked because it compelled viewers to reconsider everything they had just seen without changing their overall meaning, and the final turns of Unbreakable and Signs added deeper subtext to their central characters’ struggles. In all three cases, the movies turned out to be about more than they first appeared; The Village is the first film on Shyamalan’s genre résumé that proves to be about less.
