There’s a new M. Night Shyamalan movie opening this coming weekend, but you’ll have to wait a couple more days to hear how it is. Trap, starring Josh Hartnett as … well, let’s say less than the trailer does, is not screening at all for the press in advance of its release on Friday. Shyamalan still divides critics. The reviews for his 2021 film Old, for example, were rather evenly, ahem, split between positive and negative. So it’s possible the studio is trying to delay the inevitable pans. On the other hand, maybe it’s just closely guarding the secrets of Trap. This is a Shyamalan movie, after all. There are bound to be some major surprises.
It’s never been fair to reduce this Hollywood hitmaker’s body of work to a mere collection of plot twists. Going back to The Sixth Sense, the unusually melancholic 1999 sleeper phenomenon that made his career, Shyamalan’s films tend to be more than the sum of their 11th-hour revelations. Still, it’s no great mystery why everyone became fixated on the rug pulls above all else. The writer-director trained audiences to expect them! For a while there, every new thriller he made seemed to be straining to replicate the mind-blowing power of The Sixth Sense’s final minutes — to leave the audience buzzing and reeling and talking on the way out of the theater. Twists were his brand, even if his movies didn’t live or die on them.
Eventually, that brand became a punch line. Everyone seemed to turn on Shyamalan at once, even as they (mostly) still turned out for his movies. A filmmaker once treated as the heir apparent to Steven Spielberg was now the target of hacky comedy sketches, his name in a trailer eliciting a chorus of groans from the peanut gallery. Arguably, you can trace this reputation shift to a single movie — the one that opened 20 years ago today. The Village, about a secluded rural community living in fear of mythic creatures in the woods around them, so irked its audience that the name Shyamalan became synonymous in many circles with cheap tricks. Almost overnight, it marked him as a P.T. Barnum of multiplex hoodwinks.
There are actually two twists in The Village. Is there any point in protecting them at this point? If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance you know what Shyamalan was hiding, the secrets that turned his audience into incensed hecklers. For most of the movie, we’re immersed in the lives of this woodland community, an Amish-like settlement that strictly adheres to its sacred laws — no straying into the wilderness, no wearing red — that are designed to protect the uneasy truce with a race of creatures skulking through the foliage surrounding the encampment.
And then the leader of the community, Edward Walker (William Hurt), reveals the truth to his blind daughter, Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard). As it turns out — spoiler alert! — there are no monsters. The elders who founded the community invented them to keep everyone in check, to keep them from leaving the village. And, as we learn (but Ivy does not), the villagers are playing a very elaborate game of dress-up. It is not the distant past, but modern times.
With these reveals, staggered over the final half-hour of The Village, Shyamalan pushed his predilection for twists past the point of excitement and on to exasperation. This is the moment he flew too close to the sun while chasing that Sixth Sense feeling. People felt cheated by the movie. If you went opening weekend, you could feel the disappointment in real time, a mass deflation of intrigue at the first scene where Shyamalan reveals what’s really going on with the town of the title. It was like watching the Sixth Sense balloon pop in front of you. “Holy crap!” had given way to an almost audible “Can you believe this crap?”
OK, but here’s the real twist: The Village is one of Shyamalan’s best movies — a sad, rather lovely fairy tale about a civilization pressing against its self-imposed boundaries. Back in 2004, on first viewing, the film felt like the narrative equivalent of a sucker punch. “The whole enterprise is a shaggy dog story, and in a way, it is all secrets,” Roger Ebert witheringly wrote in his one-star review. You had to wonder: How could a movie constructed around those secrets have any replay value? Wouldn’t any further viewing be pointless? But rewatching the movie today reveals something close to the opposite. Unburdened by expectation or mystery, it’s easier to appreciate the beauty of The Village’s construction, and the numerous grace notes beyond its revelations.
A lot of Shyamalan’s movies are like tug-of-wars between elegance and awkwardness: You marvel at their craft, cringe at their tin-eared dialogue. That’s true in one sense of The Village, too, which is pretty silly in broad strokes — the story doesn’t hold up to a lot of scrutiny — but often exquisite in the details of the telling, from Shyamalan’s striking use of primary colors (particularly red and yellow) to Howard’s achingly open performance as the brave, smitten Ivy.
Even the stiffly florid affect of the dialogue has a purpose, or at least an explanation. We’re watching characters who are either intentionally or accidentally doing an imitation of old-timey vernacular — a kind of sad cosplay of the American pilgrim experience. The Village sometimes plays like a precursor to the social-conditioning comedies of Yorgos Lanthimos, where the bizarro-world speech patterns become a reflection of how society controls our understanding of the world. In a sense, Shyamalan’s dialogue underscores the sad absurdity of what the elders of the community have created: a theme park yesterday where everyone is playing a part and living out a romanticized notion of an earlier era. If anything, that aspect of the movie is even more cutting today, in the wake of a political movement built on the slogan of returning America to a “purer” time.
There are some fabulously tense sequences in The Village, which remains suspenseful in the micro sense even when you know the trajectory of the macro. (One scene involving a knife is so brilliantly executed by the director and the actors that it stuns you into breathless silence.) But the film is ultimately less a thriller than a kind of Twilight Zone melodrama, like Shyamalan’s version of an Edith Wharton novel, where characters maneuver around their feelings and are hemmed in by the constrictions of social propriety. You might think, too, of Jane Austen during the tender, tentative courtship between Ivy and Joaquin Phoenix’s shy, taciturn Lucius. There is, of course, an extra layer of repression to the artificial community The Village depicts: In willfully regressing to an America of the past, the founders have forced the people into social restrictions of yore.
Shyamalan’s movies sometimes have a childlike purity of emotion, even when he’s not following young characters. He seems to apply that innocence even to adult conflicts like divorce. In The Village, a whole community has arrested its development by willfully shrinking its world. The elders have trapped their children in a perpetual adolescence of fear and seclusion. That’s the tragedy of the film, amplified by performances shorn of irony and by a wrenchingly gorgeous score by James Newton Howard. Given the films he’s made since, you could call this another of Shyamalan’s meditations on the burdens and anxieties of parenthood. By trying to protect children, do we close them off from richer experience?
Anecdotally speaking, audiences did not, in a larger sense, connect with The Village’s more idiosyncratic qualities — though the movie was a hit, as most of Shyamalan’s have been. The very marketing campaign that got butts in seats also created unrealistic expectations: People came for the creature feature that the suggestive, intriguing trailers promised, and were confronted with what felt to many like a cruel trick, a monster movie without actual monsters. The Village is reasonably scary in stretches, but it often barely behaves like a thriller at all, and it deliberately defuses its suspense when the jig is finally up.
The thing about the twists, too, is that they fundamentally change the nature of what you think you’ve been watching. That wasn’t true of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, or Signs — terrific studio thrillers that delivered what they promised to deliver, and then put everything in a new context at the end. The Village is built around its twists. At a certain point, it says that the movie you’ve been watching is a lie. That can leave an audience feeling as betrayed as the children of the village should. It’s also a major miscalculation on Shyamalan’s part to tease “maybe the monsters are real” in the third act, only to say nope, just kidding, it’s the guy with a developmental disability (Adrien Brody, whose performance, unlike the film, has not aged well).
Still, The Village is a welcome anomaly: a strange, allegorical soap whose Rod Serling elements don’t cancel out its poignance. Shyamalan, possibly bummed out by the reception, would take a long, probably wise break from the gotcha game while failing for years to achieve the kind of acclaim that greeted his early 2000s run of imaginative set-piece machines. Ironically, he got back into the good graces of an American moviegoing public with The Visit, a low-budget thriller that very much did offer a big surprise — albeit one less redefining than The Village’s reveals. What’s that they say about Hollywood? You’re only as good as your last twist.
The Village is available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, please visit his Authory page.
