The Village (2004) * 1/2

Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, Bryce Dallas Howard, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver

It's safe to say now that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has used up all of the goodwill he had built up with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.     His last two films, including this one, have been absolute clunkers.    The Village has a threadbare plot to say the least. It treads dangerously into Blair Witch Project territory with its silliness and simplicity.    I wonder if Shyamalan referred to this film as "Blair Witch meets Signs" when pitching it.   The fact that Blair Witch and Signs are two of the worst movies of recent years isn't good, but my guess would be that the studio simply threw him a pile of money because of his last three hits.

I won't delve too much into the plot to be helpful to those who haven't seen the film and still wish to, even after I do everything in my power to dissuade you from seeing it.   You'll thank me one day.  But I digress,    The Village takes place in circa the late 19th century in what seems to be rural Pennsylvania.   A funeral opens the film and the gravestone of the soon-to-be-buried body reads "died 1897", so you can draw your own conclusions from that.    The village inhabited by about a hundred people is adjacent to ominous-looking woods.     These woods are allegedly inhabited by "Those We Do Not Speak Of.." (this is exactly how they are described by the villagefolk).   Are they monsters, people, or aliens?   That is not known.   But apparently there is a truce between the village and woodspeople in which the villagers stay in the village and the woodspeople stay in the woods.

William Hurt plays the village leader, both spiritual and otherwise. His blind daughter and a young man named Lucious (Phoenix) are in love and wish to be married.   He doesn't say much, so the blind girl really doesn't have much to go on while believing she's in love with the guy.    But soon, a bad thing happens.   Phoenix is stabbed by the jealous village idiot (Brody), who also loves the blind girl. He will die unless someone can enter the forbidden woods and reach "the towns", which have the necessary modern medicines needed.

So the plot is in motion figuratively but certainly not literally.   The Village is as plodding and serious as Signs and thus had me checking my watch often.  I was also rather offput by the dialogue these actors had to utter.   Their sentences seem to contain way too many words.   They speak eight words when three will do, adding lots of prepositions at the end.    Also, if you keep bringing up "Those We Do Not Speak Of" often enough, shouldn't they stop being "Those We Do Not Speak Of?"

I will not be specific about the ending, except I believe it brings about more questions than answers. The original plot was thin to begin with.   Throwing in that ending made me ask whether the whole thing is really worth the trouble.   What do the principal parties have to gain by what they are doing? Why did they do it? What drove them to it?   In many surprise endings, the shocker fills in the blanks and fits within the story.  The one in The Village only creates more blanks to be filled in. 
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