The Village (12A)

Scare in the community

When you've made your reputation on high-toned scary movies that pull a big third-act twist, the pressure to deliver a comparable surprise with your next one can't be easy.

When you've made your reputation on high-toned scary movies that pull a big third-act twist, the pressure to deliver a comparable surprise with your next one can't be easy.

M Night Shyamalan has been both beneficiary and victim of his best-known film, The Sixth Sense. On the one hand, its success inclined the studio to grant him a creative licence unknown to most directors, and on the other, it has generated a sense of expectation that his subsequent films Unbreakable and Signs failed to meet. There seems little danger that Shyamalan will ever compromise in making exactly the movie he wants to; what's not so encouraging is the suspicion that fewer and fewer people will want to watch that movie.

The Village doesn't exactly resolve the problem, being ominous in mood, handsome in design and preposterous in denouement. I watched it in a pleasant trance of absorption, but left it muttering to myself.

A Gothic romance with allegorical resonances, it is set in a remote Pennsylvania backwater, apparently during the late 19th century. The small community has deliberately cut itself off from the outside world, and any temptation to venture to "the towns" is stifled by fear of what lies in the dense woods surrounding the village. The proximity of forest bogeymen - "Those we don't speak of" - is manifested in distant howls and the flayed carcasses of farm animals, and any sighting causes the villagers to flee terror-stricken to their cellars. They also avoid anything red - berries, flowers, clothes - in the belief that the colour attracts the visitation of these shadowy demons.

Not everyone's a scaredy-cat. Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix), a reticent young fellow with nervous eyes, is curious to know of the world outside, and only the admonitions of his mother (Sigourney Weaver) and leader of the elders, Edward Walker (William Hurt) prevent him from setting off into the woods. Lucius senses a conspiracy: "There are secrets in every corner of this village," he says, but he can't work out what they are. Nor, for long stretches, can we. Shyamalan deals out clues, but not until the end do we see their meaning in the overall scheme: why, for example, do three village elders separately allude to mourning the violent death of a close relative?

The plot brews up around an imbroglio involving Lucius, a giggling simpleton named Noah (Adrien Brody, distracting in the village-idiot role) and the girl they both love, Walker's blind, intuitive daughter Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard). And, as is usually the way, one is left feeling sore.

The film sets up a fruit- ful tension between pastoral innocence and collective anxiety. Had Shyamalan been working in an earlier era, we might regard the imminent attack of a malign "red" force as a metaphor of anticommunist dread, a cue taken from The Crucible. Yet the village folk, far from being hysterics and backstabbers, seem a genuinely harmonious bunch, closer kin of the self-sufficient Amish in Witness than the pinched puritans of Salem.

Shyamalan's cinematographer Roger Deakins uses light with beautiful ambiguity. The flaming torches that line the village boundaries offer the promise of protection yet also appear to warn against escape, and the Andrew Wyeth-like shots of lamp-lit interiors look both cosy and disconcerting, as if the walls themselves have something to hide.

The way in which the village elders keep their people in a constant state of alarm touches on the very contemporary issue of American governance: indeed, the panic- mongering spirit is pretty much what Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 reckons to be a key tactic of the administration of George Bush.

Shyamalan himself, it must be said, is no slouch when it comes to manipulation. He knows how to play an audience, and how to use the camera for maximum fright. Just as the alien darting out of the cornfield in Signs was a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, our first glimpse of "those we do not speak of" is basically on the level of "those we didn't quite see and would prefer it that way, thanks very much".

Fear of death, gathering in the shadows, bursts right out into the open, and the mission of fetching vital medicine to save a man's life requires a villager of peculiar bravery to step up to the plate. That the task should fall to Ivy, on the grounds that she won't have to see the denizens of the woods, not only impugns her father's courage but makes no sense once the film has unveiled its twist. But this is not to suggest that you won't be on the edge of your seat as the poor girl stumbles through Blair Witch territory and a certain red-cloaked creature lurks in the distance. The lines from The Ancient Mariner come to mind: "Like one that on a lonesome road/ Doth walk in fear and dread... Because he knows a frightful fiend/ Doth close behind him tread." In a word: yikes!

The odd thing about Shyamalan films is their inherent resistance to re-watching. Once the twist has been revealed, you can't help regarding the movie as an elaborate trick, and a second look will be of interest only to those sticklers who need to spot the joins. In the case of The Village it's a shame, because the stunt ending eclipses more complex achievements, like the superb sense of composition and the luminous performance of the newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard.

All the same, thinking of her now, I'm afraid one of the film's smaller inconsistencies rears up. Think back to that taboo colour: it's surprising that a man as painstaking as Shyamalan didn't notice that his heroine has red hair.