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The Village Review
by Ray Garton
 2004
Written and Directed by:
M. Night Shyamalan
Starring:
Bryce Dallas Howard - Ivy Walker
Joaquin Phoenix - Lucius Hunt
Adrien Brody - Noah Percy
William Hurt - Edward Walker
Sigourney Weaver - Alice Hunt
Brendan Gleeson - August Nicholson
Normally, I’m very careful when writing a movie review not to reveal the movie’s secrets and surprises. I hate it when a reviewer tells me more about a movie than I want to know.
But in this review, I’m making an exception. I’m telling all. So, if you haven’t seen The Village and you don’t want the whole thing spoiled for you, don’t read any further. I feel it’s my duty as a critic to tell you everything, because that’s the only way I can properly let you know just how bad this movie is. This movie is so bad that if a fork had been handy while I was watching it, I would’ve plunged it into my eye, all the way into my brain, and then I would’ve twisted it.
I know that some of you who haven’t seen the movie will continue reading this review in spite of the spoilers, and you are the ones I want to reach. My theory is that to give away the movie’s secrets will not spoil the movie for you, it will convince you not to go. And frankly, this movie has already made far, far more money than it deserves, thanks mostly to a completely false, misleading ad campaign. The trailers for The Village lead one to believe it’s a horror movie, when in fact it is not. A horrible movie, yes, but not a horror movie.
The Village is about – surprise, surprise! – a village surrounded by a forest that no one enters. The village itself, as well as the clothes people wear and the absence of any kind of technology, leads us to believe this story takes place sometime in the late 1800s. In this village, no one uses contractions – everyone is so somber and solemn that the movie is made deadly dull by their very behavior. While there are a lot of people wandering around in this village, and a lot of people at the big community meal at the beginning of the movie, it’s never quite clear what all these people do.
We are told that in the woods surrounding the village live strange and deadly creatures that are attracted by the color red (at one point, a red flower is found by a couple girls and they quickly pluck it out of the ground and bury it from sight). These creatures have a truce with the people of the village, as you know if you’ve seen the trailer – the villagers do not wander into the woods, and the creatures do not enter the village. But animals are being killed and skinned at night, and there are red marks painted on the doors. Something’s up. Is the truce over?
Edward Walker (William Hurt) gathers with other village elders in meetings that exclude the younger members of the community. A young man named Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) petitions the elders to let him go through the woods into "the towns" for medicine and other supplies. The elders are against it.
Walker’s blind daughter Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) wants to marry Lucius. Lucius’s widowed mother Alice harbors deep feelings for Edward, feelings they don’t act on – that would be too close to something actually happening in this movie, and nothing does, not really. The village idiot, Noah Percy (Adrien Brody) does a lot of jumping around and laughing, acting like ... well, an idiot. He has feelings for Ivy. When he discovers the relationship between Ivy and Lucius, Noah becomes jealous and stabs Lucius. Near death, Lucius is out of luck because, apparently, there’s nothing in the village in the way of first aid.
Ivy asks to go through the woods to the towns and get the necessary medicine to treat Lucius. Her father actually goes along with this idea.
Now, let’s make sure we’ve got this straight. Lucius lay dying with no way to treat him, and who do they decide to send into the woods? A blind girl. But before she goes, her father explains something to her – there are no strange creatures in the woods. Edward and the other elders contrived the creatures to keep people from leaving the village. He takes her to a shed and shows her one of the creature costumes – a red hooded robe with long twig-fingers dangling from the baggy sleeves – as if she could see it.
Ivy heads into the woods. There, she is stalked by one of the red-robed figures. But we already know the creatures are a fabrication of the elders, so there’s no suspense here at all. But director M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t seem to realize that, because the sequence is directed as if we’re supposed to be scared by it. Instead, we simply wait to see who’s under the red hood. It turns out to be Noah, who found one of the costumes under a floorboard. But Ivy manages to dispatch him easily enough, and she continues toward the towns.
One thing that’s not explained at this point is why the elders don’t want anyone to leave the village. But it’s pretty damned easy to figure it out, long before it’s revealed. The movie’s big secret is that it’s not the late 1800s, it’s 2004. The village was the idea of a group of city-dwelling therapists who got tired of being the victims of crime.
No, I’m not kidding.
M. Night Shyamalan has had considerable success as a minimalist director. He knows how to effectively use silence, when not to show us something, and when to give us a brief, tantalizing glimpse of what’s out there. His picture Signs doesn’t hold up when you think about it too much, but while you’re watching it, you’re so caught up in the suspense that you don’t notice.
The Village, on the other hand, was a bad idea from the beginning. It’s so thin and so empty that it wouldn’t work as a thirty-minute Twilight Zone episode. And yet there it is on the big screen, an A-list big-studio movie. Had Shyamalan sat down and tried to think of a way to completely alienate his fans – hell, all his viewers – a way to piss people off and damage his career, he could not have come up with a better way to do that than The Village.
I don’t remember the last time I left a movie theater feeling so angry, so burned, so cheated. If you have not seen this movie, I cannot urge you strongly enough not to see it. I’ve enjoyed Shyamalan’s work in the past, but after The Village, he’s going to have to work very hard to win me back. I’m insulted that Shyamalan – and everyone at Disney – thought audiences would be entertained by this movie. It’s as if someone bet Shyamalan that he couldn’t make a really shitty movie and make it a hit, and the director proved him wrong.
I’ve altered my rating system somewhat for this movie. Normally, I give zero through four bloodshot eyeballs. But The Village is so bad, that system simply wasn’t enough.
The Village is the worst movie of 2004 so far. And it’s going to be hard to beat.
[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]
The Village
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-4
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