M. Night Shyamalan's The Village is a blunder, the work of a consummate artist too carried away with his own hype to tell the story he probably really wants to tell. That hype is well deserved; I stand by my opinion that his last and best film, Signs, is a work of suspense worthy of Hitchcock. This time, his talent gets overshadowed by gimmickry, and the result is a mess -- a fascinating one, but for reasons most audiences aren't going to bother recognizing.

The story, according to the excellent-as-usual marketing campaign, is about a colonial village living in fear of the creatures that live in the surrounding woods. The trailers are pretty frightening bits of marketing, but they're advertising a different movie, and the casual moviegoer is going to feel unfairly duped. The Village, without giving anything away, is not all that scary, and can best be described as a combination of the two elements Shyamalan has attributed the inspiration for the story to: Wuthering Heights, which he was considering adapting, and September 11th.

Go ahead and try to figure it out now, based on that infomation. That's about all he's revealed about the movie in interviews, but the well trained Shyamalan fan will go into the theater armed with those facts and apply it to every beat of the film until suddenly the entire plot clicks into place like clockwork. What they'll figure out...well, of course I won't spoil it by even suggesting a reaction, but I rather wish there was nothing to spoil at all. If Shyamalan really wanted to surprise audiences, he wouldn't surprise them. That's more or less what he did with Signs, which didn't have a twist; that film seemed to begin at the beginning and never stopped building until it reached its natural ending, supported by everything that had come before it. Here, he seems to have started with the twist and worked backwards from it, and as a result there's no propulsion.

Shaymalan is far less interested in the creatures in the woods than he is in the love quadrangle between four of the main characters, and there is a definite lack of balance between the horrific and the achingly romanting. Much time is spent on pining glances and discussions of subdued emotion, which isn't necessarily a bad thing; there are some scenes that are truly moving. The film is interminably slow, which isn't a bad thing either; but when the mystery dissipates not once but twice, in both instances earlier on than one would expect, the pacing loses any suspense it might have accumulated. I have a feeling people are going to get rather bored after an hour or so, when the enigma of the creatures has been revealed but the young man still hasn't told the girl he loves that he does, in fact, love her.

I wasn't bored, for two reasons; the first is the cast. Neither William Hurt nor Sigourney Weaver take well to Shyamalan's dialogue (his attempts at period-speak are often laughable), but the filmmaker should consider himself indebted beyond his means to Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard, half of that aforementioned romantic square, who bring more to their characters than could possibly have been written on the page. Howard in particular, who has never been in a film before and ends up carrying this one on her shoulders; she's a true gem, and I can't wait to see her take up Nicole Kidman's role in Lars Von Trier's Dogville sequel, Manderlay.

The second reason is that it was interesting to see Shyamalan stumble so badly, while at the same time his growth as a filmmaker is so frequently clear. In between all the clumsy pacing and silly dialogue, you can see him stretching as an artist, trying out new stylistic traits and confirming old ones as his personal style. There are beautiful sequences of the villagers going about their day to day lives, the girls dancing as they sweep the porch, that recall the elegant visual simplicity of Barry Lyndon, and images of of stunning pastoral beauty, like when a winter rain turns the woods into a forest of glistening ice. There's a momemt of violence that's shot in such a way to make it more horrifying than any supernatural force of nature could be, and there's also a one-take scene between Phoenix and Howard on the porch of a house that is as well written as anything Shyamalan's ever done; and yet he's still trapped by that apparently inconquerable desire to hook the audience, and all of his growth comes undone and the film feels like a jumbled mess of some brilliant pieces and too many bad ones.

Shyamalan's often said that his films all spring from some great idea, which he then develops into a story. That's how I write, as well, although I often find that the story takes on a life of its own and by the time I finish it, that original idea has been left by the wayside. I think that must have happened here, except that he kept that original idea. I have no doubt in my mind that he's talented enough to have worked it all together into a cohesive and credible whole, but the fact of the matter is that he hasn't. I'll forgive him for it, and I'll probably hold this, the film that made him truly fallible, in some sort of special regard for that very reason. General audiences, however, will not be so kind.