M. Night Shyamalan's The Village: A Review

William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix, Sigourney Weaver in Uneven Thriller

Dec 8, 2008

Off to a promising start, The Village loses steam at mid-point of movie.

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village has all the components of an effective thriller/morality tale. Led by a talented cast, the movie features a great premise: A group of people, disaffected with the growing urban violence which has touched each of their lives, have come together in an experiment to create their own utopian civilization.

Led by billionaire Edward Walker (William Hurt), they forge their own village far removed from the rest of society and call it Covington, modeled after a 19th-century Pennsylvanian village. The plan is to raise their families in a society without fear and violence, and the younger villagers are unaware that modern society exists just outside the woods.

There is a dark side, however, to this Little-House-on-the-Prairie perfection. In order to preserve the integrity of their vision, the village leaders have created a set of “controls” whose purpose is to prevent the residents from leaving the village: mystical, evil creatures that live in the surrounding woods. Curiosity ultimately supersedes fear, and younger villager Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) ventures out into the woods a short distance, despite warnings from his mother (Sigourney Weaver). The same night, the “creatures” attack and kill some of the village’s animals as punishment for his transgression.

Meanwhile, Lucius has been forming a relationship with blind villager Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard). Jealous of the young couple, mentally-challenged Noah Percy (Adrien Brody) stabs Lucius. Out of her love for Lucius, Ivy is determined to visit the nearest village to obtain medicine for his wounds, requiring a trip into the woods.

It is at this point that the movie falters. The tension that has been building is ruined by a premature “reveal”, the a-ha moment in the film where the audience is let in on the “secret”. Normally a clever twist, presented at the right moment, the reveal’s purpose is to surprise the audience, causing them to re-think everything that they have just viewed, consequently turning the movie’s plot on its head. One has to wonder what M. Night Shyamalan was thinking when he sequenced this particular portion of the script. Edward lets Ivy in on the truth: there are no creatures to fear in the woods, they are simply the village elders in costume.

With the cat out of the bag, subsequent events become anti-climactic. The potentially frightening scene where Ivy is terrorized by the creatures in the woods now feels stale and redundant, with the audience aware that the creatures are just villagers in monster-suits. The audience-reveal should have been simultaneous with Ivy’s: the moment she jumps over the barrier into modern society was the logical and most effective moment to reveal to the audience the true nature of the village.

Despite this poor judgment in timing, the movie does have some merits: beautiful imagery, good acting, and a thought-provoking storyline. The moral of the story lies in the inherently inquisitive, uncontrollable nature of human beings, and the insatiable thirst for knowledge that ultimately results in the loss of innocence of the villagers and likely downfall of their artificial construction. The violence that the villagers have attempted to keep out of their microcosmic society has inevitably seeped in: the seeds of destruction were firmly planted from the village’s conception.

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