Missing the forest for the twist: Revisiting The Village at 20

The trajectory of M. Night Shyamalan’s career as a director has had almost as many twists and turns as his movies. After a brief honeymoon period following the massive success of The Sixth Sense, it wasn’t long before audiences and critics started to sour on the wunderkind filmmaker once hailed as the next Steven Spielberg. A large part of that disillusionment can be attributed to the negative response to Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village and, in particular, a collective feeling of being let down by its admittedly clunky finale. In his scathing review of the film at the time of its release, Roger Ebert called The Village “a colossal miscalculation” and said of the ending: “To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.” But with 20 years of distance, it’s a good time to reconsider that perception, and look back with an appreciation for the full shape of the story Shyamalan was trying to tell.

Despite his deliberate camerawork, evocative framing, attention to detail, and mastery of tension, Shyamalan was, in 2004 and to some extent today, most known for his twist endings. The thing about a twist, though, is that it’s most effective when you don’t expect it. The reason The Sixth Sense blew everyone away was because audiences went in without seeing it coming. What became Shyamalan’s defining trait as a filmmaker, fairly or unfairly, quickly became his biggest liability. And it’s had an outsized impact on every original film he’s made since. Even after the trailer for his latest film, Trap, seemed to reveal a sort-of twist in the setup, the conversations prior to its opening mostly centered on what the “real” twist of the film might be. 

The same thing happened 20 years ago when audiences got their first look at The Village. By the time they got to the theater, many moviegoers already had theories about what the twist would be, and spent the film playing the guessing game, waiting to see whether they were right. It didn’t help that The Village, which followed Shyamalan’s alien smash Signs, was originally marketed as a monster thriller—so that’s what people went in expecting to see.

The original poster features a disembodied pair of hands holding a piece of parchment with rules of engagement: “I) Let the bad color not be seen, it attracts them. II) Never enter the woods, that is where they wait. III) Heed the warning bell, for they are coming.” It’s no surprise, then, that people were disappointed when The Village turned out to be not so much a period creature feature but something closer to a political allegory, with shades of folk horror and a touch of romance. That’s hard to convey on a poster. It’s even harder to explain the film’s meaning and central themes when understanding them depends on knowing the hidden truth about the village itself. 

Is a spoiler warning required for a 20-year-old film? Just in case, consider this your warning that I’m about to spoil the hell out of The Village. Or maybe not. At least, not in the traditional sense of the word. If you haven’t seen it and have no idea how it ends, maybe knowing the twist won’t actually spoil the experience of watching it at all, but instead make it more enjoyable.

Essentially, The Village is about the lengths humans will go to in order to eradicate every negative aspect of life—want, crime, grief, violence—and our ultimate inability to do so, no matter how hard we try. It’s about the limits of faith, a theme Shyamalan returns to frequently, and how it can be used as a tool of control. 

The film begins with a funeral for a child. It’s tragic, of course, but there’s another layer that isn’t clear unless you’ve seen the entire film: It’s exactly the kind of trauma that the “elders” were trying to run from when they left “the towns” behind in the 1980s and set up their idealized, self-reliant society in the middle of a Pennsylvania wildlife preserve. It’s the ultimate patriarchal fantasy, an isolationist cult that mimics the America many conservatives picture when they talk about making it great again. But it’s all a farce. They have to hide this truth and make up stories about threatening creatures roaming the woods to keep the children in line, or as Edward Walker (William Hurt) puts it, to protect their “innocence.” But the ruse (the success of which depends entirely on Walker’s family fortune back in the real world) directly leads to the death of at least two of their children and, by the end of the film, leaves one in dire need of modern medical intervention. 

Though there aren’t actually any monsters in the woods, Shyamalan effectively uses color (particularly those rich shades of yellow and red) and meticulously framed shots to convey the idea that something very real and scary lurks there. The woods have always been a powerful allegory in film and literature, and Shyamalan follows in that tradition by having them represent the uncomfortable realities of life lurking in the distance. You cannot escape death by hiding behind a wall. Violence is part of human nature. Grief waits patiently beyond the treeline for its time to appear. No matter where you go, you take your trauma with you. Yet, it’s impossible to fully understand any of those deeper ideas unless you know the origin story of the village, and what Walker and the others set out to do when they established it. 

Do multiple watches ever make The Village click? Or even make sense? I won’t go that far. There are still annoying logical inconsistencies, gaping plot holes, and things left unexplained. Why did the elders go to such elaborate and dramatic lengths to keep up their ruse? How did they go for so long without anyone letting the truth slip? Why didn’t Walker or one of the other elders make the journey through the woods instead of Ivy, if they all knew the secret already? No amount of time or distance is going to fix those issues.

But despite these problems, and a structure that undermines its power, The Village deserves to be reconsidered for its isolated moments of beauty and poignancy, moments that prove Shyamalan to be a masterful visual storyteller. Legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins gives the film a lovely, painterly quality with his atmospheric lighting designs. He relies on practical sources like oil lamps and candles indoors, while diffusing the sunlight outdoors to create an overcast look. That melancholy tone is enhanced by James Newton Howard’s resonant score, full of melodic strings and dissonant harmonies that hint at something sinister underlying the pastoral tranquility of this rural community. And, of course, there are the extraordinary performances of the cast. Bryce Dallas Howard is incandescent as Ivy, a blind character who can see people for who they really are. Joaquin Phoenix plays her sweetheart Lucius as a stalwart man of few words, but he wears his heart on his sleeve. And as the developmentally disabled Noah, Adrien Brody is an unpredictable loose cannon you can’t help but sympathize with, even when he commits horrific acts. William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver anchor the film with their gravitas. The bench of talent is so deep here that we get Brendan Gleeson, Judy Greer, Cherry Jones, and Jesse Eisenberg in supporting roles (Eisenberg’s role amounts to little more than a featured extra, but you can’t miss him). Not one of them gives anything less than a thoroughly compelling turn.

Perhaps if Shyamalan had made The Village later in his career, he would have handled the story more deftly. Perhaps if audiences hadn’t been set up with false expectations the twist wouldn’t have been so disappointing. We can’t go back and change the past, but now that Shyamalan is known for more than just his twist endings, we can give The Village the credit it deserves.