![]() ![]() It displays a mastery of storytelling, and increasing maturity in how to deploy the twists or surprises that people call his signature. But on its own, this film lives and breathes more fully as a story and a next step in his filmmaking evolution. If you watched each new story by Shyamalan from this period unfold in real-time, after four films in just over five years - seeing not only the movies themselves, but the wave of hype accompanying their release, and the swirl of commentary and speculation that followed - then it’s easy to have reached a point of fatigue or skepticism that seemingly employed a similar structure to weave their magic. Whether she will succeed makes the difference between this next generation of town leaders surviving and literally dying but also the importance of her venturing outside without revealing the secrets of the village - or discovering too many of the realities of the outside world - makes her actions pure and powerful. The elders founded the town to escape from their own grief after each of them experienced a painful act of victimization or violence, suffering unimaginable loss, and revealing this fact after its integrity is tested by a sudden act of violence against young Lucius amplifies the emotional weight of Ivy’s journey for medicine. Shyamalan’s patience and skill in revealing these details is not a trick, but a way to give the characters’ actions increased meaning. ![]() Specifically: (1) the audience learns that the beasts living outside the woods are a fiction created by the elders to keep the children and their families from trying to leave and (2) the village exists not in the 19th century as its fashion, architecture, and culture suggest, but in modern-day Pennsylvania, inside a wildlife preserve where it’s protected from modernity and the dangers that the elders built it to escape. Meanwhile, Shyamalan begins slowly peeling back the layers of his plot, offering increasing clarity about different elements of the film to provide the audience with a fuller picture. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s change of perspective in Psycho from Marion Crane ( Janet Leigh) to her sister Lila ( Vera Miles), the film shifts to follow Ivy as she embarks on this dangerous trip, and faces the creatures that she and her fellow townspeople were warned about. When Lucius is injured after proposing for Ivy’s hand in marriage, Ivy asks her father Edward ( William Hurt), the town leader, for permission to make the same journey that Lucius wanted to undertake - only this time, to save her fiancée. In the meantime, he develops a quiet infatuation for Ivy Walker ( Bryce Dallas Howard), a headstrong and adventuresome blind girl who cares for the children of the village, as well as a developmentally-disabled young man named Noah ( Adrien Brody). They forbid his expedition not just because these cities are full of crime, violence, and poverty, but also because outside the boundaries of the town, mysterious creatures lurk in the woods, waiting to prey on its people. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Lucius Hunt, a young man raised in the small town of Covington who appeals to his elders for permission to visit neighboring cities for medicine that might save lives and alleviate pain. That said, there are twists it’s just that nobody paid attention to the real ones. ![]() Night Shyamalan story, but one of his best, not because each new detail about these characters and their world comes as a surprise, but because the filmmaker uses them to flesh out his vision, to offer new perspective, and most of all to anchor, fulfill, and deepen the ideas and emotions that make those details seem so surprising. Now available on Movies Anywhere and eligible for users to send a Screen Pass*, it’s easier to see the film without the inherited skepticism engendered by its predecessors: after 16 years, The Village has endured not just as a great M. Unfairly maligned at the time, its story about an isolated Pennsylvania community menaced by mysterious beasts rankled audiences because it seemed to fold one twist on top of another. ![]()
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