#i love scary movies i'm constantly craving a good one that has good atmosphere and good lore and minimal jumpscares and gore

[anonanimal]

some thots on M. Night’s ‘The Village’

this is...too long. spoilers obv

This isn’t college so instead of a coherent essay I’m serving up some disjointed paragraphs. I expect literally no one to read this. Please don’t. Ok, here we go.

At first I thought the dialogue was just awful, stilted, and impossible to work with, judging by the terrible performances of several otherwise decent actors, but the reveal that we’re in modern times makes it...kind of make sense. If you squint. They’re all modern people doing their best (and failing) to imitate the speech of last century. At least that’s what I tell myself to keep from fixating on the more obvious conclusion that M. Night badly needed some help with the script that he apparently didn’t get.

The twist was weak as fuck. If there had to be a twist at all, it should have been that the monsters are real, the outside world is modern, and has fenced off this section of forest to keep the monsters inside. A splinter group of humans, left inside for whatever reason, figured out how to coexist with the monsters but are stuck in the past. It can be set in the present day and the monsters can be real, ok? Instead, we got “the monsters are fake social control and it was the present day the whole time!! the buildup was for nothing!! haha you got shaggy-dog’d!!” If I had been at the premiere I would have booed. Roger Ebert really was right that the whole “fake monsters / modern times” twist was barely better than “it was all a dream.” Right up until the twist was revealed I desperately hoped that the monsters were real, because they had been handled so well so far, and that some original, spooky secrets about the monsters and the village would come to light. But instead we got that Margaret Peterson Haddix book.

Slapping a twist ending on this movie really did it a disservice, because there’s no time to explain anything. Instead of leading us on with the horror premise, we could have established that the monsters are fake and it’s 2004 early on, and we could’ve had a cool hybrid horror-drama about...idk, politics or something.

I have a pet theory that Walker killed both his father and the business partner and framed the business partner so he could inherit the money, finance his perfect society, and satisfy his megalomania by being the cult leader he was born to be. He was doing the racist tumblr pastoral fantasy before it was cool. Modern life is too corrupting, let’s all go back to a simpler time when the white people lived together in harmony on huge swathes of stolen land. No more cities, no more towns, only the racially homogenous village.

The one thing I liked about the movie, I loved. I love love loved the way the camera only gives you glimpses of the “monsters,” a blurry image here, a flash of red cloak there, the scratches too high for any animal to make, the way you sometimes only see the back of someone’s head as they look in the direction of the monster. It was the perfect amount of showing us something really is there and giving us the vaguest idea of what it looks like, but holding back so that our imaginations still do most of the work. I eat that shit up tbh.

It honestly kind of felt like this movie started out with the intention of the monsters being real, but M. Night couldn’t deliver on all the interesting shit he had made up (why do the monsters wear cloaks? why do they skin animals and leave the meat? what’s with the red marks on doors? why is yellow the safe color? how was the truce made in the first place?) and hand-waved it all away with his flaccid twist. BOOOO!!!

I’m not even sure if this movie had any themes. The only one I could tease out is like... the dangers of overprotectiveness / romanticizing the past? Motherfuckers tried to create a perfect, peaceful, crime-free society, but I bet all the kids that grew up in the village are pretty traumatised by the constant threat of the seemingly very-real monsters they’ve been allowed to catch glimpses of. The monsters are only referred to as “Those We Do Not Speak Of,” adding to their potency (see: Voldemort). When monsters come to town, the people hide in their cellars, and there’s a throwaway line about drills, indicating they regularly practice their hidey-hole procedure like it’s the fucking cold war. The strain of the uneasy “truce” with the monsters must always be in the backs of their minds. They have the blazing border around them as a constant reminder. They obsessively shun the color red (which they only call “The Forbidden Color” or some shit) bc it attracts the monsters (honestly why did the “elders” make up that one? just another wacky form of social control? wtf. wait. is this all actually a cold war metaphor?????). Those that have only ever known the village are probably stressed af, I bet everyone has night terrors.

Well, if they ever attempt a sequel, the outline is already in place. The village is unsustainable. How will they choose who inherits the truth and the costume-wearing duties? The money financing the protection of the land can’t last forever, what happens when it runs out?

On a final note, I have to say that Adrien Brody’s character Noah seems extremely ableist. The fact that evil still found its way inside their “perfect” society, in the form of developmentally disabled Noah who stabs Lucius out of jealousy over Ivy, doesn’t sit right with me at all. If the intended message with that was “evil...uh...finds a way,” wouldn’t a non-disabled jealous rival character have served the purpose even better? Maybe M. Night was (extremely clumsily) trying to make the character of Noah fit in with the “dangers of overprotectiveness” theme by saying “look, if they lived in modern society he could have gotten proper help!” (which would be dumb tbh bc that ignores how badly disabled people are treated). Here’s a blog post by an actual disabled person that looks at ableism in several Shyamalan films.

Anyway, this could have been a very good straightforward horror movie, or a mystery/drama/thriller, and either format could have been used to tell a story about...idk social control or something, but instead we got a maddeningly unsatisfying half-baked waste of ideas. Maybe in 20 years it’ll get a remake or a “reimagining.” I rate it a generous 2.5/5 stars, not so much for what it was, but *sigh* what it could have been.