M. Night Shyamalan’s Most Underrated Movie Just Started Streaming
M. Night Shyamalan's The Village is streaming on Apple TV+ through January 31.
M. Night Shyamalan’s career as a filmmaker has had more highs and lows than perhaps any other major director. From the enormous box office grosses and cultural footprint of his 1999 breakthrough The Sixth Sense to the nadir of the Will Smith/Jaden Smith science-fiction thriller After Earth in 2013, he has been around the block. Shyamalan’s most underrated film, 2004’s The Village, is currently streaming on Apple TV+, but only through the end of January.
Shyamalan’s The Village stars an immensely talented cast of actors, primarily led by Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard (in her first major role), but including William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson, Adrien Brody, Judy Greer, Michael Pitt, and a young Jesse Eisenberg. The film opens in an isolated 19th-century Pennsylvania village, where a small bucolic community lives in peace. Quickly, it is revealed that the villagers live under a tense treaty with “Those We Don’t Speak Of,” mysterious, red-cloaked monsters in the woods surrounding them.
Shyamalan focuses The Village primarily on the relationship between the softspoken but courageous Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard’s character of the blind daughter of the chief town elder, but a significant part of the movie focuses on the day-to-day lives of even such a peculiar community as this one. The movie takes the time for the romantic yearnings of various villagers, moments of schoolchildren learning their lore, the way the teenagers dare each other to stand at the edge of the forest as long as possible to tempt the monsters. For all of the high-concept hook of the movie, Shyamalan draws the details of The Village carefully and methodically.
After the astonishing success of The Sixth Sense (which made nearly $700 million on a $40 million budget), there really was nowhere but down for the director, in some ways. Audiences and critics alike quickly labeled him as a filmmaker who relied on a twist, which Shyamalan seemed to lean into; it cannot be denied that The Village depends entirely upon a final reveal that you either buy into or utterly hate.
2004 can be seen as the end of Shyamalan’s golden run as a dangerous young filmmaker, with The Village being the last of it. He would follow it with the critically reviled Lady in the Water, the colossal misfire of The Happening, and then the work-for-hire disaster of The Last Airbender. It wouldn’t be until 2015’s The Visit that he would climb his way out of the chasm in a remarkable return to form.
But Shyamalan’s The Village remains the point in his early career right before his ambition crashed into failure, when he still had the critical regard and box office grosses to gather some of the most talented character actors in the world and build a 19th-century village out in the woods. The Village is less a horror movie than a fairytale that slowly reveals its own artificiality as it goes on, but that is not what audiences wanted from M. Night Shyamalan in 2004. If you can look past the need to watch for the twist, you can actually find yourself surprised.
