FrancisPage

Reel To Reel:
The Village

How It Rates: **1/2
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Sigourney Weaver, Adrien Brody
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Some gross scenes, brief scary violence

Preconceived Notions: M. Night Shyamalan's latest thriller. Can it deliver the scares of "Signs" with the twist of "The Sixth Sense?"
The Bottom Line: Not enough scares. But there's a twist.

I'm reluctant to discuss The Village at length because understanding what I think about it requires giving away one of several twists. Overall, my problem with it is that the foundation seems built upon a set of rules -- yes, those rules you see on the poster, along with some others -- that in the end, don't really matter that much. Yes, the movie has scary moments, but there are far too few of them to classify this in the same league as The Sixth Sense or Signs, which uses silence so effectively. But like the Blair Witch Project, here is a film which is less about scaring the audience than it is about scaring the people in the film's village.

The film gets off to a slow start, set in a rural village in late 1800's Pennsylvania, right down to the archaic diction of its inhabitants (Brownie points to Shyamalan for getting a language detail many films would miss). The village is surrounded by woods, blocked off with yellow penants and a warning -- don't go into the "forbidden woods" or those "who we do not speak of" will attack you and likely the whole town too. We are told a truce exists, like two street gangs who have carved up territory. You stay off their turf and they'll stay off of of ours. Oh and one other thing -- if you see anything red, pick it up and bury it. Those who we do not speak of are attracted to it.

We wouldn't have a movie unless somebody broke the truce. And somebody does. But the town's reaction to it is puzzling. And so are many scenes in the first half of the film that focus more on village life than the creatures who threaten it. I wondered if I had walked into Sense And Sensibility by mistake. However, the reason for those scenes becomes obvious by the end of the film.

I will give you a choice here. You can either stop reading and avoid potentially figuring out a spoiler or go on for more analysis. If you want to read on, highlight the white space below with your mouse.

Okay. You have chosen to enter the forbidden woods.

Like I said, there is much more focus on village life than the creatures. And the reason for this is because of the nature of the creatures themselves, which leads us to another reason why the woods are off limits. Without divulging that secret, I will merely tell you that reason, while understandable, simply seems cruel in the context of what I would consider to be the pioneer spirit of that age. Again, without divulging a plot twist, I will simply say that a much larger danger surrounds the village, and that is the real reason the woods are off-limits.

We are not told how long the village has existed, but we do know its origins. And those origins, depending on how you look at them, seem like either an act of genuine compassion or cruelty by ignorance. The Village raises questions beyond the scope of its presentation about those who live there and what they are thinking. You could make an entirely different movie about their motivations and actions. I don't know what it would be like, but for a hint, maybe you should watch the PBS Series Frontier House.