The Village: M. Night Shyamalan's Misunderstood Love Story

It was supposed to be his greatest achievement.

When The Village arrived in theatres 15 years ago in the summer of 2004, M. Night Shyamalan was riding a singular wave of success. After three hit films in a row with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, Shyamalan was set to continue his hot streak with The Village, a brand new thriller about a 19th century settlement terrorized by monsters lurking in the woods. While it made a handsome profit at the box office, it was widely considered the director’s first failure, vilified for being short on scares and its supposedly unsatisfying final twist. Critics were confused. Audiences felt betrayed. Where was the thrilling horror film they were promised?

Well, that’s the thing about The Village. It was never a horror movie.

It was a love story.

Great Expectations

To understand why The Village was so misunderstood upon its initial release, we have to discuss the specific set of contextual circumstances that are unique to this film. Although he had directed two films prior, general audiences were properly introduced to Shyamalan in 1999 with The Sixth Sense. The landmark horror film made him a household name, generated over $670 million worldwide and garnered him Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture. The Sixth Sense wasn’t his debut, but it jump-started Shyamalan’s career in such a profound way that he became a cultural icon basically overnight.

He followed up The Sixth Sense with Unbreakable in 2000 and Signs in 2002, both of which were also met with critical and commercial success. Major blockbusters around the turn of the millennium, such as Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace in 1999, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001, and Spider-Man in 2002, would herald the resurgence of running franchises that would come to dominate multiplexes for the next two decades. At a time when science-fiction, fantasy and superhero franchises started taking up more and more of the global box office, Shyamalan’s original films thrived in the genre space. He had managed to turn himself into one of the few working directors who could get general audiences to show up in droves on name recognition alone.

But with recognition comes expectations, and although Shyamalan fans expected great movies, they also expected Shyamalan movies. His first three hits, while all different narratives, did establish particular conventions that gave his films their unique flavor and appeal. On the more esoteric side, Shyamalan films are commonly prolonged meditations on the nature of trauma and recovery, preoccupied with faith, mortality, and storytelling as a force for spiritual enlightenment and cultural change. But what audiences remembered was what was on the surface: Shyamalan made suspenseful thrillers with shocking twist endings. After three movies in that vein (even if Signs has more of a final reveal than an out-and-out “twist”), Shyamalan’s next project was one of the most highly anticipated films of the year, but moviegoers expected it to follow the template they were familiar with. The Village has many of the same elements, but they’re in service to a genre he had never tackled before.

In all fairness to the audience, the marketing is largely to blame for selling them a wholly different vision from what was intended. The trailers focused almost exclusively on the monster sequences, which make up a tiny portion of the final film. The posters listed three rules the villagers were supposed to follow to avoid provoking the creatures. Even with the craft on display, such as brilliant cinematography from Roger Deakins, incredible performances from Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody and William Hurt, and an Academy Award-nominated musical score from James Newton Howard, preconceived notions are hard to break. People thought they knew what they were getting when they went to see The Village, but the real twist was that the movie they wanted wasn’t the one Shyamalan made.

A Cocoon in the Woods

The Village opens not on an image of terror, but of sorrow. August Nicholson (Brendan Gleeson), one of the elders of Covington, a small settlement in a valley surrounded by an ominous forest, cradles a wooden coffin. The gravestone names the unseen body inside to be that of his son Daniel, dead at the age of seven of an illness Covington doesn’t have the medicine to treat. After the funeral, Daniel’s death is barely discussed. Grief in this village is simply a part of life, and as we later learn, the core of its very foundation. Edward Walker (Hurt), another elder, remarks on that foundation with the film’s opening words: “We may question ourselves at moments such as these. Did we make the right decision to settle here?” It’s a question that hangs over the entire film, even if its full implications are not revealed right away.

What follows is a chronicle of the daily lives of the villagers. Children playing while doing chores, a communal effort to care for crops and livestock, a red berry hurriedly buried beneath the grass. There is peace in this village, but it’s coated in a cloak of fear, literalized by the yellow cloaks the villagers wear that supposedly deter the creatures in the woods. The systems that control the population’s actions are so simplistic as to seem inborn: Yellow means safety and red means danger. A sense of foreboding, of the looming terror at the edge of the forbidden woods that surround the settlement, is pervasive. The villagers might not always be cowering at the thought of “Those We Don’t Speak Of,” but they are always aware of the delicate balance that keeps the village intact, and how one wrong step might forever fracture their world.

And yet, even though its people live perpetually in fear, Covington is also a place of joy, of hope, of love. We don’t meet her until 14 minutes in, but Ivy Walker (Howard), the blind daughter of Edward and the film’s main character, is introduced holding her crying sister Kitty (Judy Greer), singing to her to help soothe her heartbreak. Ivy may not drive the action until about halfway through the film, but she is the nexus point through which the entire story derives meaning. Her father Edward created this place as a safe haven for his children, despite said isolation from society leading to no one being able to treat her blindness. Yet she lives not in pain but in happiness, proud of seeing the world in her own unique way, and confident enough in her knowledge of her environment to have foot races with her friends. Her empathy for others bleeds into the frame of every scene, and her love for Lucius Hunt (Phoenix) becomes the backbone the narrative is built around.

But if the family-oriented structure and simple domestic lifestyle of Covington helped foster goodness in the hearts of Ivy and other members of her generation, the secretive nature of the elders and the village’s predatory mythology also stunts their emotional growth and traps them in a bubble they aren’t even aware of. At the town meal after Daniel’s funeral, Edward recites a cultural saying that also feels like a personal mantra: “We are grateful for the time we have been given.” A noble sentiment, but it also cuts to the heart of Covington’s deceit. Edward and the other elders know this place can’t be sustained forever. But they’ll cling to the charade all the same, because by this point, it’s all they have left.