Review of The Village (2004) by Adam K — 17 Feb 2014

SPOILERS:

It's a shame Shyamalan got so much shit for this. Perhaps it was not advertised honestly (though I tend to think that's a smart choice in a twist film)-people were looking for more ghosts and monsters? As Shyamalan himself has pointed out, his movies aren't about scares; scares are a means to an end, a way to really pull us inside of the characters: ie, the heart of the film. In Sixth Sense, this was conquering fear; in Signs, it was having faith; in the Village, it's a coming of age story.

Ivy learns the secrets of her culture and overcomes a terrible tribulation in order to become a leader of her people. This is a tough story to tell in a culture that has totally abandoned exclusive knowledge and serious rituals of any sort. Shyamalan uses his masterful control over dramatic character-building and the artful use of scares to sell Ivy's journey totally.

There were a couple of mistakes in the Village that make it a bit less powerful than it could be. The world is rich in symbols and secrets; I found the mythology wonderfully crafted. It really came to life through the tremendously well-performed relationships, especially the central love triangle. But somehow the pacing seemed to give up secrets too freely. It feels abrupt when the monsters are revealed as fakes before the journey through the woods, though the choice is strategic and meaningful, in retrospect. The forest flight was actually more tense for me than anything in Signs or Sixth Sense. And knowing that the monster is a human after all points back to the central theme: tragedy and evil come with people, and they can't be escaped through isolation or reform.

I was rather disappointed by the ending, not because of the twist but simply because of the way it was executed. Previous revelations made the "twist" obvious in all but particulars, so there wasn't much weight to it. Worse, breaking the sphere of the setting seemed to also break the emotional tone of the story. After it happens, nothing of import occurs. And unlike in the Sixth Sense, it doesn't draw any new insights to what has happened so far. The story was over when Ivy reached the wall.

On a sort of tangential note, I loved how the culture was never patriarchal (I mean, more than the inevitable) or repressive. It's a refreshingly positive portrayal of communal living when places like the Village are so often associated with cults and Christianity. And it helped sell the central moral ambiguity of the story: there is no villain in the story but fate and the inevitable tragedies of human life.