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By Jonathan Walsh
M. Night Shyalman, virtuoso of the surprise ending, has pulled it off yet again, somehow managing in the final five minutes of this film to alter your suspicion that you were merely watching a piece of crap, to the awful realization that it's actually much, much worse. The feeling that two hours of your life have been completely wasted on a terrible film usually dissipate as the house lights come on, unable to fix on a single culprit. Was it the acting, the directing, the absence of a plot, or just Ben Affleck. In this case, the director, writer and producer reminds us at the very beginning, and on all the promotional materials, that this is M. Night Shyalman's The Village and that he must take all the credit. Yet, while for some that name immediately instills the unspeakable fear that what they are about to watch could be even drearier than Signs, for others it still offers the hope of a movie to rival The Sixth Sense, the director's debut and a film so successful that it should allow him to continue making whatever he likes for the remains of his natural life, perhaps longer. Gulp.
Not that Night isn't attempting to do something new here. Obviously perturbed by the direction in which America is headed, the maestro has decided to bypass the Michael Moore route of merely stating the direction in which America is headed, instead concocting an allegory of a land ruled by fear, where children and adults alike are told that what lurks in the woods is so evil that it cannot even be named. Better to stick to the confines of the village, surrender your curiosity about the world outside to the bucolic bliss of warm summer meadows, comely young maidens in 19th-century dress and endless fields of wheat (crop circles, thankfully, not included). But plucky Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) has had enough of living under the shadow of terror and is determined to set foot beyond the village's borders, to confront "They Who Must Not Be Named" and invite them 'round for dinner. This causes a team of village elders led by William Hurt to redouble their efforts to persuade their young folk of just how scary "They" are, and to retreat from notions of escape.
Hurt and co. (Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleeson among them), likely having failed the auditions for Lars Von Trier's Dogville, continue nevertheless in the same earnest manner as the Dane's actors to spell out the message underpinning the allegory. With the acting turned all the way up to 11, Shyalman shoots much of the film as if it were a stage play, occasionally dimming the lights to remind us that not only is this an important film with an urgent message, but that it's also a scary one. Boo! Aware of his own place in the lineage of American cinema, Night even makes a fleeting appearance at the end, laying claim to Hitchcock's crown and reminding you yet again, should you have forgotten about the name above the title, just who the master of this circus is. In case you thought he was just a clown.
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