Film Studies: Digging for dirt (or 'The Buried Secret of M Night Shyamalan')

I am writing this on Wednesday 28 July, and I can hardly wait. Yes, I could have settled the matter earlier; I could have seen a press screening, in advance. But I am waiting for Friday and a packed house - there is something more innately frightening in the situation if you consider that fear could cause a riot in which we may be trampled. I am not going to see M Night Shyamalan's The Village until opening day.

"Night", as his fans speak of him, is that very cool, taciturn Indian, born in Pondicherry only 34 years ago as Manoj Nelliyattu Shyamalan, the child of doctors, who has gross box-office earnings of over $1.3bn so far for his films, The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002). Not that I regard him as a man with an unfailing touch - Unbreakable was unendurable and defiantly uninvolving; and while Signs had spooky moments (corn circles are a great starter), it yielded eventually to the ponderous gloom that has overtaken Mel Gibson. Plus there was the unwise decision actually to show the menacing forces that were threatening and to ponder such ultimate verities as the purpose of life.

But the more I see it, the more confident I feel that The Sixth Sense is one of the knock-out American films. I use the word "knock-out" (as opposed to great or masterly), because I think there is a need to convey the nature of certain American movies - ravishing and conscious-altering as you see them, yet quickly forgotten and forgiven for their assured trickery.

What I'm trying to suggest is that The Sixth Sense has about as little useful to say about life and death as Casablanca has about North Africa or the Second World War. But while you are watching either film, you are having a great time.

And the thrust of the work - the tension in its enactment - depends a great deal on the lovely discord between a great child actor (Haley Joel Osment) and a handful of adults led beyond their ordinary range (especially Bruce Willis, Olivia Williams and Toni Collette).

Shamelessly, "Night" has cultivated the notion that he is not entirely of this world, that he is spiritually blessed by the weird contrast of Pondicherry and the Philadelphia where he now lives, and that he keeps such a calm, smiling, straight face in the storm of questions posed him because he is one very wise Indian. After all, "Night" is more becoming than "Ron" or "Ernie". And this Night, I think, is a very canny operator.

Until a few days ago, there were some among the faithful who would have shuddered at the suggestion of anything as vulgar as cunning calculation in Night. He trades in the occult, and there are always some ready to go overboard in that cause. But now, the real Night is revealed, and while the Ouija board crowd may be dismayed I admire him even more than I did before.

It was Sunday night, one of those oddly unsettled July days, hot, humid and still all day, and then a sudden wind came up with the darkness. Somehow our simple home felt isolated in nature, cut off from society or help. With wan faces the children gathered and said, "Let's see the M Night Shyamalan doc, Dad!" There it was, on the SciFi channel (every taste is catered for in this great nation), stretched out over three hours, broken up with commercials for such things as the new M Night Shyamalan film, The Village, in which an isolated, religious community living in the deep countryside of Pennsylvania at the end of the 19th- century begin to believe that there are malignant creatures out there in the woods - "those whose names we dare not speak".

The documentary was called The Buried Secret of M Night Shyamalan, and it was directed by someone named Nathaniel Kahn. There he was, this Mr Kahn, on camera, wrestling with his dilemma: how to uncover the real, inner story of Night. The doc, it seemed, had a deal with Night and The Village, to show the location and the sets and to have an interview with Shyamalan himself. But Mr Kahn knows that this set-up is just a polite way of holding his enquiry at arm's distance. He longs to get inside, and - so it seems - in the process he nettles the usually unflappable Night.

It is the pressing notion in Mr Kahn's eager search that Night does indeed see and talk to dead people, and this facility (or habit) apparently derives from a terrible drowning incident in his childhood - in a Pennsylvania pond! - when Night actually died, but came back from the other side, with a little extra knowledge sand a mission to make movies that gently shone light on that netherworld.

So it is that Mr Kahn pursues leads of his own - such as the discovery that Johnny Depp once backed out of a Night project because he had never met so controlling a person before. The coup comes when Mr Kahn and his camera knock on the door of a room at the Chateau Marmont, LA's most fashionably raffish hotel for the younger set, and who should open the door but Johnny Depp. "Are we rolling already?" asks the winsome and obliging Depp - such a wonderful actor - and then he's inviting the director in and telling him everything he can remember. Indeed, Depp even tells Kahn about the set phrases Night schooled him in if ever anyone was brazen enough to ask him about the project. Well, in only a few minutes in this documentary, we're with Adrien Brody (who's in The Village, along with William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver and Joaquin Phoenix), and without batting an eyelid Brody comes out with nearly exactly the phrases Depp was taught! These scenes are the closest to wit or sophisticated comedy that I have seen for many years. At which point, my older son turned to me and said he reckoned that crafty Night was making this whole film! It was a beguiling interpretation, especially as the apparent conflicts between Kahn and Night grew, ending in a stand-off where Night refused all further assistance to the documentary.

In the next few days, the offices promoting The Village gave out insistent communiques that M Night Shyamalan had had nothing to do with The Buried Secret of M Night Shyamalan, that he disavowed and disliked the project. Well, maybe. At the same time, if he's ever thought to create a prime-time television special that drew attention to his own mystique, craft and teasing reticence, he couldn't have done better than Mr Kahn.

The only thing I have to add is that if The Village has the atmosphere and the wicked timing of this documentary, then the call is going to be raised again (as it was with The Sixth Sense) that M Night Shyamalan is the next best thing to Steven Spielberg. On the other hand, if The Village is as bad as Unbreakable, if it flops, then people are going to be telling stories about this silly young Indian who has the nerve to call himself "Night".

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'The Village' is released on 20 August