I saw Shyamalans "The village" recently. I thought I'd write some of my thoughts on that film here.
First of all, I'd seen "The sixth sense", and from what I knew about the author I expected: well-crafted suspense in the beginning, but toward the end of the film, the curtain is drawn away and we see that the scary things are not so scary after all. Fair enough. I can see why some people don't like this, but it's OK with me. It's a decent message in itself after all.
The Village follows this pattern, but with some twists. Like his other films, we are expected to accept some pretty weird premise, and in this case it's a utopian village in the woods of Pennsylvania that has been isolated from the outside world for several generations, on account of the red-cloaked, clawed monsters that inhabit the surrounding forest. Well, I liked the X-files when I was young (especially the episodes that weren't about UFOs), so I thought it looked interesting, but it turned out very different, and happily it was far better.
It's unconventional though. It breaks many well-established rules of film-making. For instance, the curtain is drawn away like I expected, but it happens approximately in the middle of the film, before the protagonist journeys through the forest. Shyalaman instead tries to keep the suspense up, and succeds, sort of, but it's not as scary as the first part of the movie, where you don't know what's behind the curtain. Anyway, I must say that this is a good film. It manages to convey credibly a desperate longing for a better society, even though the premises and the twist are arguably quite ridiculous. The beautiful photography and the beautiful score manages to catch my imagination enough that it doesn't matter. Using Hilary Hahn must have taken a bite out of that 60 million dollar budget, but I think it was worth it. Certainly the score compares very favourably to certain other films I've seen recently, which I will not mention here.