The Village is a 2004 American psychological thriller film, written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver. The film is about a village whose inhabitants live in fear of creatures inhabiting the woods beyond it. Like other films written and directed by Shyamalan from the same time period, The Village has a twist ending.
The film received mixed reviews, with critics especially divided about the plausibility and payoff of the ending. The film gave composer James Newton Howard his fourth Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.
In the 19th century, residents of the small, isolated Pennsylvania village of Covington live in fear of nameless creatures in the surrounding woods and have constructed a large barrier of oil lanterns and watch towers that are constantly manned to keep watch. After the funeral of a seven-year-old boy, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks the village elders for permission to pass through the woods to get medical supplies from neighboring towns; however, his request is denied. Later, his mother Alice (Sigourney Weaver) admonishes him for wanting to visit the neighboring towns, which the villagers describe as wicked. The Elders also appear to have secrets of their own and keep physical mementos hidden in black boxes, the contents of which are reminders of the evil and tragedy they left behind when they left the towns. After Lucius makes a short venture into the woods, the creatures leave warnings in the form of splashes of red paint on all the villagers' doors.
She lives within a soft rime world
Where the sun only appears far behind the mountains
She´s the hostess of a warm and humid cave
Constantly open to coldness
Perennial plant bred in manure
She´s infested by the old stench of the past
A wildflower growing in concrete
Withered petals that foreshadow the end of the trip
The flame in the sky dies behind the village
Pink and yellow clouds fade into the night
On the living room table snow mound, the throne
In her mind winter has reborn
Dressed in her anesthetic armor
She can play what they want
The spanks, the insults, a flood of degradation
Perverted cocktails that hoist him to the 7th sky
I wear a thousand masks but none of them are mine
Offering myself to strangers in the night
Caresses like salt on open wounds
The chronicles of sorrow that only result in pain
When she finds herself alone, within herself
The emptiness echoes like the wind at the bottom of a
lost valley
Astray in the middle of a world out of reach
Only her sadness vibrates her broken heart
4-inch heels with a skirt wriggling on her hips
She´s without a doubt the queen of the street
Delivering a majestic parade on the sidewalk of
paradise
She offers herself to the hungriest beasts of the
forest
With her feline claws and eyes
She makes the vultures skew at her
She releases a smell of fresh meat
That awakens the instinct of muzzled wolves along their
path
Your existence, your life erodes this way
Like a cliff at the edge of a violent sea
And if one of these springs you don´t wake up
It would be the beginning of an eternal winter