Домой United States USA — Art M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village is an underrated masterpiece

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village is an underrated masterpiece

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It’s a movie about the blind spots of nostalgia and the dangers of always wanting to be safe that is always relevant.
Director M. Night Shyamalan has become known to most film buffs as a joke, an enormously promising director who squandered his talent on an endless string of twist endings and self-aggrandizing projects that suggested he had bought his own hype. He is perhaps best summed up by the joke the TV show Robot Chicken makes about him:
In terms of his public reputation, Shyamalan first began to suffer in 2004. Before that, he was on a hot streak. The Sixth Sense (1999) was a box office sensation and received numerous Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. Unbreakable (2000) is a terrific movie, a gloomy, surprisingly moving take on superhero stories. And Signs (2002) prompted magazine covers touting Shyamalan as «the next Spielberg.» (It’s not all that great, but it boasts some superbly creepy sequences .)
In 2004, however, Shyamalan released The Village, and a whole bunch of things that had been swirling around his head descended at once. His overreliance on twist endings came to be seen as a weakness, and the hype surrounding him had become deafening. Worse, he seemed to have bought into it, as a contemporary promotional movie suggested. He was primed for a fall. Reviews were weak, but audience response was atrocious. The film dropped 67.5 percent at the box office between its first and second weekends — a sure indication of viewers rejecting the film.
Shyamalan’s post- Village output has stumbled, but he’s had a minor comeback in recent years, beginning with 2015’s The Visit, and continuing with 2017’s Split, which received his strongest reviews in years and made lots and lots of money. His latest film, Glass, wasn’t as fondly received by critics, but it’s continued his recent run of solid box office takes.
But conventional wisdom on Shyamalan’s career is wrong on at least one count: The Village may be the director’s best film, and one of the most interesting looks at the American film industry’s early attempts to incorporate the Iraq War into fictional contexts. It’s been unjustly derided, and now is as good a time as any to change that.
The biggest complaint about The Village is that its big twist is completely ridiculous. (If you haven’t seen the film and somehow want to remain unspoiled, stop reading.)
Late in the film, Shyamalan reveals that the reality the whole film has been based on is a lie. The Village seems to be set in a New England agrarian community in the 1700s or 1800s, whose residents eke out their livelihood based on what they can coax the earth into giving up. The town is haunted by monsters from the woods, which come at night and take away anyone who is not sufficiently hidden away.
The point-of-view characters are older teenagers — played by a young Bryce Dallas Howard and Joaquin Phoenix — raised their whole lives in the town’s restrictive environment but increasingly wishing to push the boundaries they’ve been raised within.

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