Review of The Village

Of the four films of M Night Shyamalan's that are panned as bad- The Village, The Happening, Lady in the Water and The Last Airbender- I thought The Village(having just finished re-watching it yesterday and was not sure what to make of it at first) was the least bad of the four, to me the other three are as bad as they're said to be.

I wasn't expecting to like it after so many uncharitable things both here and elsewhere and by how it was marketed, but I sort of did. It does look great with beautiful scenery and brooding cinematography and the score is very haunting, eerie quality about it. There are also some genuine jolts and poignancy in the first half, and The Village with a great concept does start off intriguingly.

The best thing about it though is the cast. William Hurt is nuanced and intelligent and Joaquin Pheonix is wonderfully stoic, but the biggest surprise was Bryce Dallas Howard, who was fantastic and quite moving here. There were however a few disappointments, and I say this as I consider these actors the most accomplished generally of the cast. Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleeson are great actors but underused and Adrien Brody comes across as wasted in a rather nothing role.

What let The Village down and from stopping it from being more than it had potential to be was that while M Night Shyamalan can have films where he is a master-storyteller(The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable) or where he is sloppy(2nd half of Signs, The Happening), he comes across as rather over-ambitious here. The story is so interesting at first, but the second half is let down by too many ideas, and some of them are wonderful ideas but underdeveloped.

Consequently the pace becomes more drawn out, the dialogue becomes clunky and apart from Howard I found myself indifferent to the characters by the end. And to top it all, the ending is ridiculous. All in all, not that bad but has a lot wrong with it in my opinion. 6/10 Bethany Cox