Night moves.(The Village)(Movie Review)

'HOW come we never heard about the magic rocks before?" asks a befuddled character in The Village, M. Night Shyamalan's new film. By this point in the film, audience confusion will likely have given way to irritation. Shyamalan, who has brought us such dramatically compelling and subtly frightening films as The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002), here produces an absurd film, with an incredible plot that veers unintentionally from its intended genre of horror into comedy. It may not be the worst film of the year--The Day After Tomorrow remains a serious contender--but it certainly ranks as the most disappointing.

The disappointment is a consequence of the expectations aroused by Shyamalan's previous efforts. With The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan announced a new beginning in the horror genre. The gory, nihilistic bloodfest into which horror movies had sunk in the 1990s put filmmakers in a bind: The genre and its audience had increasing, and increasingly jaded, expectations for the aesthetics of evil, spurring competition to outdo previous films in the quantity and quality of the acts of maiming, raping, decapitating, and murdering victims. The greatest novelty to emerge in the late 1990s was the genre's degeneration into self-conscious parody in the Scream and Scary Movie films.

Then came Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense appeared in the same year as The Blair Witch Project; even more than Blair Witch, whose scares rested mostly on the gimmickry of a hand-held camera, Sense returned us to less overt forms of horror, predicated upon audience sympathy with the dilemmas of the characters. Shyamalan self-consciously locates himself in the tradition of Hitchcock, who once said, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." Like Hitchcock, Shyamalan appears in his own films--you can spy him as the one revealing secrets at the end of The Village. At his best, Shyamalan slowly builds the tensions and then delivers bangs, as in Cole Sear's sudden vision of ancient hangings in his modern-day Philadelphia grade school in The Sixth Sense or the appearances of the aliens in Signs.

Much more than Hitchcock, Shyamalan exhibits an abiding interest in questions of faith and divine providence. The Sixth Sense is pitched at the intersection of life and death, where souls struggle for reconciliation, for a way of putting their lives in order; Signs is about the loss and recovery of faith, about the fundamental option between chance and providence. Of course, these films are also about fear: fear of death, fear of being trapped in the evils of the past, and fear of individual and cultural catastrophe from an unexpected malevolent intervention.

The theme of fear, in this case fear of the entire, tainted modern world, is once again at the forefront in The Village, which features a late-19th-century Amish-like community that has purposely isolated itself from the rest of society. In this film, Shyamalan wants to create a mood of unseen but encroaching menace, the sort of mood captured so effectively in Peter Weir's underappreciated Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). In The Village, the menace, represented as the "ones we don't speak of," is associated with the color red, the "bad color."

A boundary ...