#578: The Village
If it feels like a bad dystopian YA novel that’s because it is
Initial release: July 26, 2004
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
She’s an ordinary young woman, almost supernaturally pretty, intelligent, witty and chatty, totally ordinary except for the fact that she’s blind and can see peoples’ auras. He’s an ordinary young man, handsome, taciturn, and humble, but braver than any other boy in the village. Sounds like the makings of another crappy young adult novel, right? Wrong, it’s actually M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village.
If you cared about movies in the early 2000s you’ve almost certainly heard of Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense made him a critical darling, and he had a string of successes since. But sometime around the mid-aughts, his previously seemingly unbreakable status started showing signs of cracking, and The Village is probably where he started to really be perceived as an overconfident auteur filmmaker convinced of his own genius. And why not? He’d built his career on surprise plot twists, but where it felt natural in The Sixth Sense (at least as far as I remember the film, which I haven’t seen in twenty years) in The Village it’s just so thoroughly manufactured.
The Village was marketed as horror, and indeed the trailers gave it a strong folk horror vibe in the vein of The Wicker Man; but what it actually is, and really where its strength lies, is a character study about an isolated community, specifically the young people who live in such a community and the strange rules that govern their tiny society: do not wear red, do not go into the woods, and run and hide when the bell rings. The mysterious creatures who occupy the woods, referred to only as Those We Don’t Speak Of, barely factor into the film — we see them all of once before the first reveal. The movie instead focuses on Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard, probably the single best part of the movie) and Lucius Hunt (an entirely-too-old Joaquin Phoenix), young adults just trying to live day by day in this unnamed village in late 19th-century Pennsylvania. And, at least in this regard, it’s not a bad film. There’s some drama over the mysterious red-cloaked beasties in the forest, and more drama over their mutual friend, Noah (not one of Adrien Brody’s better roles) who has some kind of unspecified neurodivergence and ultimately turns into a would-be murderer (and, it’s indirectly implied, is the one leaving slaughtered animals around the village.) All in all, a fairly typical period piece drama with some weird supernatural hooey for spice.
So let’s talk about how total bullshit this movie is. Spoilers ahead!
First up is Noah. I hate this character so much. I have a big issue with how disability is portrayed in film, especially characters like Noah. The Village’s relationship with disability is actually kind of infuriating, given that not one, but two disabled characters are played by non-disabled actors, a common practice in Hollywood much the same way as they continue to cast cis men to play trans women. But that’s just the background radiation for disabled people, that disability will always be used as a prop. Where The Village really falls down is the kind of infuriating stereotypes that Hollywood disability film plays on. In Ivy’s case, it’s being able to see peoples’ “auras” (which is how she can tell when Lucius is there, though she consistently refuses to tell him what color his aura is) and even an implied sense of telepathy. For Noah, he has a tendency towards violence, often being placed in a Quiet Room (the closest thing the village has to a jail, and it’s implied he’s the only one who’s ever in it) for one misdeed or another. This culminates in him stabbing Lucius repeatedly after Lucius and Ivy announce their plans to be wed, and later terrorizing Ivy because… reasons. This is the kind of thing Tropic Thunder was trying to critique, and nobody got it.
On to the other bullshit thing. In the film’s climax, Ivy is let in on a few truths about the village (which we are purposefully initially redirected from) and sent through the woods to fetch “medicines” for Lucius. As she travels alone through the forest, we cut back to the village elders, who at long last open the black boxes they keep tucked away in corners of their houses, revealing through photographs and voiceovers that it is not 1897, but 2004: the village elders, all of whom had lost family to the violence of 1970s New York City, chose to found an isolationist community deep in a forest preserve owned by Ivy’s father, an American history professor and son of a murdered billionaire. To that end, they somehow pulled some strings to get the preserve labeled a no-fly zone, which makes no sense, as this note on the film’s IMDB page puts it:
While there are areas which have heavily restricted flight patterns, there are almost no areas which have complete bans on overflight. These areas are almost exclusively the ones used or occupied by the President of the United States or which have national security interests.And even those areas will allow military and emergency overflights if they are required by need.
It would be virtually impossible to purchase the right for not only civilian aircraft, but also military ones to not overfly a particular region. Even if it were possible to do so, aircraft would still have to be allowed to fly NEAR such locations as not doing doing could itself create navigational hazards which could endanger them.
And finally, while restricted overflight areas DO exist, they are often subject to accidental and intentional overflights by civilian pilots. Unless there is a squadron or wing of aircraft prepared to challenge the aircraft or the facility has anti-aircraft defenses, there is no way that overflights could be prevented or even seriously discouraged.
At the very least, as long as we’re making up reasons to not go in the woods, we could at least make up something to explain planes in the sky, right? Right!?
And if that’s not enough, well, you recall earlier when I made a few jokes about how much this whole thing feels like a young adult novel plot? That’s because it’s identical to a 1995 YA novel called Running Out of Time, identical enough that the publisher considered a lawsuit. Add to that the main character being basically a Very Ordinary But Very Special White Girl with magical powers and you can see how this is just… every YA novel ever, yeah?
Like… okay. The basic premise of the twist is cool, even if the plan is horrifying. You want to isolate yourselves from the horrors of 1970s New York, sure, okay, I get it. But in the process, you basically put yourself in a position where you simply can’t get life-saving medical care, and to maintain the illusion, you and all your boomer friends have to traumatize the shit out of your children (and boomers never needed to live in a nature preserve to do that anyway.) It’s honestly the kind of thing only a billionaire’s son would come up with, to be quite honest. It’s like one of those Galt’s Gulch libertarian “experiments” that sprout up every couple of years, such as Grafton, New Hampshire, which in the absence of infrastructure got taken over by bears.
When The Village is focusing on the character drama, it’s alright, disability shit aside. And Shyamalan’s still got an excellent sense of his craft. I appreciate the color-coding, I appreciate the cinematography. I appreciate the sense of mystery. But my god, could he be more obvious in how sneaky he’s being? In The Sixth Sense he demonstrated that he had some concept of subtlety, but here he’s altogether far too conspicuous and clever. “Oooh I’m being all sneaky and hiding things from the audience! Ooh there’s going to be a big twist and you’re all going to be so shocked!” Fuck off, man. It feels disingenuous to have a mystery film and not give the audience all of the parts needed to figure it out, but then again Shyamalan definitely seems more interested in a manufactured twist ending than any sort of coherent trail of clues for the audience to follow. It feels opaque and transparent simultaneously, so breathlessly obvious in how badly Shyamalan wants to feel smarter than his audience, to pull one over on us, so he simply tells us nothing and expects us to be surprised rather than bored when he quits teasing us and actually makes the big reveal.
The Village isn’t the worst movie. It’s got a fantastic soundtrack, a stellar cast featuring Sigourney Weaver and the severely underrated William Hurt, and it’s got some decent moments of suspense and shot composition. But my god the utter bullshit surrounding that twist. It borders on self-parody, and to be honest, that’s hardly a surprise at all.
