The Village

I certainly liked this film better than Signs. Those dorky-looking aliens stretched the limits of plausibility and ruined the whole film for me. This film has nothing so tangibly out of sync, however, it is a Shyamalan film, so you can assume the surprise ending. If you listen very closely, there will be no surprise (hint: listen for what's not being said), but even if you figure it out (for me it came during the wedding party, as the issue of sister bonding is being discussed) it's clever enough and revealed slowly enough to be recognized as a decent plot device. What matters is that the surprise is not what the film is about, and it separates this film from the rest of the Shyamalan pack. One has to wonder if he wrote it during the mass despair following 9/11. To me, it channeled the zeitgeist of America then (as it is now), i.e., our culture of fear. The "village" of the title is a community living in a valley surrounded by woods populated by fearsome beasts, keeping the villagers content in the life they've built but constantly scared of what could take it all away. Sound familiar? Populated by able actors including William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix and especially the marvelous Bryce Dallas Howard as a young brave blind woman. There are further themes in the film, but they are obvious only after the surprise is revealed, so I'll leave them for you to discover.

year: 2004
length: 107 min.
rating: 3.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368447/combined