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Everyone goes to M. Night Shyamalan’s movies for the twists, but if you can’t guess most of them within the first half-hour of The Village, then you’re more ingenuous than I am. That leaves you with everything else, and it’s better than anything the director has done since The Sixth Sense, though that isn’t saying much. The inhabitants of a rustic village in presumably turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania keep an uneasy truce with "Those We Don’t Speak Of" — forest-dwelling monsters barely glimpsed like the aliens in Signs. If the villagers don’t venture into the woods, say, to fetch "medicines" from "the Towns," the terrorists — excuse me, "Those We Don’t Speak Of" — won’t enter the village. Otherwise, life there is pretty good, if you don’t mind the antics of village idiot Noah (Adrien Brody) or the pontifications of elder Edward Walker (William Hurt), who sounds as if he were in a bad production of The Crucible. But noble Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) has second thoughts, especially when a child dies of a curable illness, and so does his spirited beloved, Edward’s blind daughter, Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard). Then mutilated carcasses mysteriously appear and red ("the bad color") marks are splashed on doors and something evil, if not very scary, this way comes. Despite the stilted dialogue and the corny suspense, the cast makes the most of it. Richard Deakins’s red-less cinematography adds a needed note of foreboding and claustrophobia, and in the end, The Village poses a thoughtful parable about bliss and ignorance. For Shyamalan of late, that’s a twist. (108 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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