Genre: thriller, drama, horror

The Village

Written and directed

by M. Night Shyamalan

Starring William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard

Classification: 14A

Rating: **

The studio behind M. Night Shyamalan's latest "don't go down to the woods today" thriller, The Village, has asked reviewers not to spoil the experience of the movie by giving away the ending.

Never fear. Writer-director Shyamalan does a perfectly good job of spoiling his own ending without any outside help.

Once again, as in Signs and Unbreakable, Shyamalan starts with a high-concept setup, lavishes his films with mannered set design, rich cinematography (the Coen brothers' favourite, Roger Deakins), deliberate pacing, an eerie soundtrack and hushed, earnest performances from his cast.

And then things fall apart.

Since his breakthrough with The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan has shown a persistent tendency to paint himself into a narrative corner and then settle for obvious effects, juvenile-literature solutions and deus ex machina stunts to extract his characters from their peril.

Anyone familiar with the director's propensity for surprise endings can guess where The Village is going long before he gets there. Half the solution can be guessed from the trailer; the rest is evident halfway through the movie.

Reports that workers on the set had nicknamed the movie "The Village of the Dumb" are an indication of the story's fundamental improbability.

A tombstone in the first scene of the movie, a funeral, tells us the year is 1897, though the townsfolk seem to be living more in a 17th-century Puritan state of mind. They tend their sheep, they are run by a council of elders, and the actors playing them are forced to utter odd mouthfuls of fake antique dialogue: "What manner of spectacle has attracted your attention?" village elder Edward asks a group of kids staring at a dead, fly-covered, skinned lamb.

Everyone speaks a lot about "that which we don't speak of," meaning some creatures in the woods. According to an ancient truce, the village folk do not go into the woods, and the wood's creatures are not supposed to go into the village.

This is an M. Night Shyamalan film, and he likes things colour co-ordinated. The creatures and the humans have a colour system, like rival baseball teams. The humans view yellow as their safe colour. Yellow flags surround the village perimeter like a race course. Everything red, including flowers and berries, is verboten.

Up from the ranks of the obedient villagers comes a rebel. Young Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) believes he should travel through the forest to the town to get medical supplies.

The town leader, Edward Walker (William Hurt), rejects the idea. Lucius's mom Alice (Sigourney Weaver) wonders why such notions get in his head.

Meanwhile, Lucius is beginning to attract the womenfolk. Kitty (Judy Greer), Edward's eldest daughter, lets it all hang out. Here is a representative slice of the purplish dialogue: "I love you, Lucius. I love you like the day is long. I love you more than the sun and the moon together. And if you feel the same way, we should not hide it any longer. It's a gift, love is."

A mistake, her declaration is. Turns out Edward has eyes for Kitty's younger sister, Ivy, a blind girl who sees auras. (She is played with plucky charm by director Ron Howard's daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard.) Ivy is also beloved by the village idiot (the description seems apt), Noah Percy, who is played by Adrien Brody.

Brody, who won an Oscar for his still and gentle performance in The Pianist, risks having it taken back with his performance here, as he cackles, rolls his eyes and howls, like some bug-eating madman from a silent-movie melodrama.

Noah's behaviour and the sexual restlessness among the younger set somehow incite new encroachments from the wood creatures. The beasties, who are briefly glimpsed, do weird things to livestock. They come into town and leave red marks on doors. (Just for fun, reconsider these scenes after the movie has ended, and try to imagine what the point was.)

About two-thirds of the way through the movie, Shyamalan decides to switch protagonists. Lucius takes a back seat, and Ivy, the blind girl, must make a trip into the woods alone. While we can all enjoy the prospect of a blind girl being stalked, the sequence emphasizes Shyamalan's worst tendencies to throw plausibility out the window in the interests of immediate effects.

Not only is The Village not credible, its shallowness makes it dislikable, a shopworn gothic plot focusing on stereotypical characters with disabilities, with no ambitions beyond playing a simple-minded audience head game.

No doubt Shyamalan has a gift for creating spooky scenes, but what he desperately needs is a co-writer with a brain.