Low Budget

The Village of Idiots

M. Night Shyamalan doesn't so much make movies as he creates a sense of gaming with the audience. This could be a good thing, and was best done in The Sixth Sense. But movies are essentially stories, and stories are about the characters in the movie. That's why I hate it when someone is creeping around and then gets surprised by the bad guy whose sole method of hiding is to be Offscreen. You can't hide offscreen! There is no Offscreen! Not to the characters, only to the audience.

So if a secret matters to the character, its revelation is profound as part of the story. If it is primarily a secret that is being kept from the audience, that's more smoke and mirrors. In The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis discovered something essential about himself at about the same time that the audience figured it out. This epiphonous moment was so perfect that it ruined the filmmaker.

Since then, Shyamalan is so obsessed with reproducing the surprise effect in the audience that he has failed to connect it to the stories. In The Village, there are several intense story/transformations going on. The elders are questioning their roles, the crazy guy is transforming into a killer, and the blind girl is learning The Truth. Unfortunately the pace of all this is one of slowly teasing the audience about The Truth, and ignoring the revelations/transformations of the characters. In the end, The Truth doesn't even really change the supposed main character. The trick of revelation has buried several good stories in this movie. This issue also goes to the question, what is the 'truth level' in the movie? I.e., from what perspective is it 'really happening?" more on that later.

posted by dan @ 9/22/2004 08:11:00 AM