The Village Treats Audience Like Idiots

M. Night Shyamalan has a lot of talent. He's excellent at creating and sustaining a mood of suspense. He has a good eye, his films feature a lot of interesting shots and he seems to work well with his cinematographer. He coaxes good, understated and sometimes surprising performances out of his actors. His characters interact with each other in a natural way with a humanity not seen in most mainstream features. Unfortunately, he has one glaring flaw that prevents him from being a great filmmaker: he has absolutely no respect for his audience.

Never has this been more apparent than in his most recent offering, The Village. All of the elements for a good film are here. The cinematography is absolutely lovely and the movie looks incredible. With the exception of some bizarre acting choices by Adrien Brody and William Hurt, the cast is solid. The concept of the film is haunting and intriguing. But all of this is destroyed by an air of condescension and a complete lack of faith that viewers will understand anything unless they're bashed over the head.

Set in a sort of late-19th century village isolated from the rest of the world, The Village almost recalls a supernatural version of The Lottery at first. The community seems idyllic, but there's a sense of foreboding in the air. In the case of The Village, this is due to outside forces — creatures in the woods simply known as "Those We Don't Speak Of" (even though the villagers seem to speak of them all the time).

For many years, the small community has shared an uneasy truce with the creatures. Led by Edward Walker (William Hurt, seemingly channeling William Shatner), they've gone about their business within the boundaries of the village, never daring to step over the line for fear of inciting the creatures' wrath. But that begins to change when a young man from the town, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks the town elders for permission to leave the village and travel through the woods to nearby towns. As the community becomes terrorized by creature sightings, skinned animals and the appearance of "the bad colour" (red) — the colour that reportedly angers the creatures — a love triangle develops with consequences that could threaten the people of the village almost as much as any monster could.

When the mystical blind girl, Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) chooses between Lucius and Noah Percy (Adrien Brody, with far less subtlety and sensitivity than the talented physical actor Nick Dinsmore brings to a similar role on television), the consequences force the villagers to face some terrifying prospects. The end result is nowhere near as good as the premise, though, because Shyamalan ruins it with clunky dialogue, graceless foreshadowing and a plot twist that has already been done better in the far superior Brotherhood Of The Wolf.

Instead of trusting the audience to follow subtle hints, he gives us overbearing shots of a black box, even more overbearing shots of people pointing to the black box, ham-fisted voice-overs and repetition of dialogue and clues that even an infant could get the first time around. In the hands of Rod Sterling (someone who often delivered clever sci-fi and horror with plot twists that never insulted the viewer's intelligence), this could have been an interesting allegory of the culture of fear in modern America. In Shyamalan's capable but smug hands, it's just a silly, scare-free thriller.