Movie Review: The Village

The Village (2004) 

Directed by M Night Shyamalan 

Written by M Night Shyamalan

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, Bryce Dallas Howard, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver 

Release Date July 30th, 2004 

Published July 19th, 2021 

The Village is a real trip, an at times exceptionally well acted, epically misguided story of outsiders with a deep, dark secret. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Lucius and Bryce Dallas Howard as Ivy. Despite a slow start, the film slowly evolves as a mysterious 19th century romance with a twist of horror movie monsters hanging over it. The couple are residents of a colony that is cut off from the rest of the nearby towns by a forest populated by monsters who live in a delicate detente with the residents of The Village.

The town elders, led by William Hurt as Ivy’s father, Edward Walker, have raised their families in fear of the creatures who are fed a sacrifice of animal flesh on a weekly basis. Residents of the Village are not allowed to enter the forest and must not wear the forbidden color, red, which is said to set off the creatures. As we join the story, the monsters are believed to be raiding the town at night and causing a panic.

In the midst of the panic, Lucius begins to spend more and more time looking in on Ivy and her family and while he is a character of few words, Joaquin Phoenix as an actor communicates all we need to know about Lucius, he’s in love with Ivy and shows it by becoming her de-facto protector. For her part, Ivy is far more open and vocal about her feelings and these two approaches collide in the best scene in The Village in which they eventually declare their love.

I had forgotten about The Village since seeing it on the big screen in 2004. This led to a wild viewing experience in which I was convinced that I completely disliked it and then shocked to find myself deeply invested and enjoying it during this rewatch. No joke, I was riveted by the performances by Joaquin Phoenix, Bryce Dallas Howard, William Hurt and the supporting players including the brilliant Brendan Gleeson and Sigourney Weaver.

Then the third act hit and my memory came rushing back. Now I remember why I hated The Village back in 2004. The third act of The Village is a complete trainwreck. From the moment that Joaquin Phoenix is knocked into a plot device coma to the reveal of the big twist well before the actual end of the movie to the nonsensical and self indulgent ending, The Village goes completely off the rails.

The next section of this review of The Village goes into spoilers so if you still haven’t seen The Village and want to remain unspoiled, jump off now and come back after you see the movie, it’s on Netflix. We’ll be here when you get back.

The big twist of The Village is despite the setting in a village that even the tombstones indicate exists in the late 1800’s, the movie is actually set in modern America 2004. The monsters that provide the oppressive atmosphere of the first two acts aren’t real. The town elders portray the monsters as a way of keeping their families from trying to leave the village and find out about the modern world outside the forest.

William Hurt, it turns out, is a secret billionaire who, with the help of the elders, created The Village as a way of escaping the crime of the modern world that had tragically taken the lives of members of every family in town. This ‘twist’ is deeply problematic in numerous ways. For instance, why convince everyone they can’t wear red? Why make red a plot point at all? It never becomes important, especially after Hurt admits to making up the rules along the way/ 

At one point, after the creatures are revealed as not real, Bryce Dallas Howard, whose character is blind, is seen to have wandered into a field of red flowers and tense music plays and you’re baffled as you know there is no danger and she knows there is no danger and yet the movie wants the scene to be suspenseful because of the monsters. The monsters that, by this point, he's already revealed as fake. Why would we be afraid in this scene?

Why didn't the elders simply declare themselves Amish and create a colony based on those values? Why the elaborate ruse about the outside world? I get that they want to frighten the children into never leaving but there has to be something simpler than goofy-looking woods' monsters to convince people from leaving. This just seems like a lot of unnecessary work to hide a secret that doesn't need much hiding.

Shyamalan directs the third act of The Village as if he hadn’t revealed the twist ending at the start of the act. The movie straight up has William Hurt admit the elaborate lie to Bryce Dallas Howard and then sends her on a journey through the now completely safe woods that is then played as if there were still real monsters on the loose. When Howard finally makes it out of the woods it appears Shyamalan wants us to be surprised that we are in modern day America.

That would be fine if he didn’t tell us that before she ever actually left the village. The only real tension is that Howard’s Ivy is blind and must find her way through the forest alone and blind. This is something she manages quite well under the dire circumstances but raises the question of why Hurt didn’t just go himself. He gives some nonsense about how he vowed to never leave the village and yet he reveals the lies about everything to his blind daughter and then encourages her to leave the village on her own? Blind, going into the woods alone. At the very least, that’s awful parenting.

The Village stinks because it wastes two acts of a really compelling drama on a twist that wasn’t a twist and a series of nonsensical story beats that the script undercuts by revealing everything far too soon. We get the secret about the fake monsters and the modern day setting before Ivy leaves into the forest. The film has an action beat left courtesy of Adrien Brody’s offensive burlesque of a mentally challenged man but that’s not what we have been building toward.

We were promised a twist ala The Sixth Sense and what we got instead was a third act that would come to define the worst traits of M Night Shyamalan, his tendency toward convoluted and overwrought twist endings and big plot moments. In the third act, Shyamalan abandons the strength and heart of the film, the love story between Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard in favor of nonsense action movie chases and a twist that he spoils himself before it can surprise us.

It’s a shame because there were two thirds of a really compelling movie in The Village.