The Village (film)

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The Village
The Village Theatrical Poster
Directed by	M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by	Sam Mercer Scott Rudin M. Night Shyamalan
Written by	M. Night Shyamalan
Starring	Bryce Dallas Howard Joaquin Phoenix Adrien Brody
Music by	James N. Howard featuring Hilary Hahn, violinist
Cinematography	Roger Deakins
Editing by	Christopher Tellefsen
Distributed by	Touchstone Pictures
Release date(s)	July 30, 2004
Running time	108 minutes
Language	English
Budget	- Production - 71.6 million USD - Marketing - 40 million USD
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

This article is about the 2004 film. For other uses of this title see The Village.

The Village is a 2004 film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan that explores the dynamics of an insular turn-of-the-20th-century village and the collective fears of its members.

1 Plot
- 1.1 Explanation of the storyline
2 Criticisms
3 Box office
4 Cast
5 Trivia
6 Awards and nominations
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Villagers daring one another to put their backs to Those We Don't Speak Of.

The film opens on the funeral of a child in a small village. The death date on the tombstone establishes the date as 1897. As the story progresses it is revealed that the villagers live in fear of nameless creatures in the woods that surround the village. They have built a barrier of oil lanterns and watch towers that are constantly manned to keep watch for Those We Don't Speak Of. It is explained that the villagers have a long-standing truce with Those We Don't Speak Of; the villagers don't go into their woods, and the creatures don’t enter their village. Even so, dead, skinned bodies of small animals are starting to appear around the village.

After the death of the child, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks the Elders (the village's governing leaders) for permission to pass through the woods to get medical supplies from "the towns". His request is turned down and later he is admonished by his mother Alice (Sigourney Weaver) for wanting to go to the towns, described as "wicked places where wicked people live". It is revealed in that scene that the Elders seem to keep dark secrets of their own in the form of black boxes, the contents of which they won't let any of "the children" see. After Lucius makes a short venture into the woods the creatures leave warnings around the village in the form of splashes of red paint on all the villagers' doors.

Meanwhile, Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), the blind daughter of the head Elder, Edward Walker (William Hurt), informs Lucius that she has strong feelings for him, and he returns her affections. They arrange to be married, but things go horribly wrong when Noah Percy (Adrien Brody), a friend of Ivy and Lucius who is mentally disabled and apparently enamored of Ivy, jealously attacks Lucius with a knife, seriously wounding him.

Edward goes against the wishes of the other Elders, agreeing to allow Ivy to pass through the forest and seek out medicine for Lucius. Before she leaves the first plot twist is revealed when Edward explains the secret of the creatures — they are fabrications created by the Elders in an attempt to keep any of their children from leaving the village. He does mention though that he had heard rumors of "real creatures" living in the woods.

While Ivy is traveling through the forest, a creature suddenly attacks her. She cunningly tricks the creature into falling into a hole in the ground where it is killed by the fall. It is then the second plot twist is revealed — the creature is actually Noah in a creature costume that he had found under the floor of the room he had been locked in. It is implied in that scene that it has been Noah skinning the animals all along.

Ivy eventually finds her way to the edge of the woods where she encounters a large wall. After she climbs over the wall the final plot twist is revealed — the film is set in the present day (a newspaper in one scene has July 30th 2004 on it, the date of the film's release). A park ranger named Kevin, driving a Land Rover Defender 90 with the words "Walker Wildlife Preserve" on the side spots Ivy and is shocked to hear that she has come out of the woods. After hearing Ivy's last name is "Walker" he agrees to help her. Once Ivy has the medicine she is looking for, she returns to the village. This sequence is intercut with brief segments showing the Elders opening their black boxes, which are revealed to contain mementos from their lives in the outside world, including one or more items related to the traumatic events in their past.

The Village. Cinematography by Roger Deakins

[edit] Explanation of the storyline

It is revealed that the village was actually founded some time in the 1970s, when Edward Walker, professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania, approached other people he met at a grief counseling clinic after his father had been murdered in a violent crime. He asked them if they wished to join him in "an idea" he had. From this apparently grew "the village"... a secluded town in the middle of a wildlife preserve purchased with Edward's dead father's fortune, a place where they would be protected from any aspect of the outside world... even airplanes (Kevin's superior, who can briefly be seen in a reflection as being M. Night himself, puts forward the information that the government is bribed to keep the village and its wood a "no-fly-zone"). Once the village was created it appears the original "elders" rolled the clock back to what they thought was a simpler, peaceful time.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Criticisms

The Village opened to mostly negative reviews^[1]. Roger Ebert gave the film one star and wrote: "The Village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn... To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore." A lot of the criticism centered on a plot that came off as "stilted" and unbelievable. There were also comments that the film, while raising questions about conformity in a time of "evil", did little to "confront" those themes^[2]. Slate's Michael Agger commented that Shyamalan was continuing in a pattern of making "sealed-off movies that fell apart when exposed to outside logic^[3]."

Fans and critics alike noted the film's (perhaps purposely) deceptive ad campaign that portrayed it as a horror film instead of the drama/love story that it was, something that may have added to the film's negative word of mouth. The movie did have a number of admirers, though, particularly among established fans of Shyamalan's work. Critic Jeffrey Westhoff commented that though the film had its shortcomings, these did not necessarily render it a bad movie, and that "Shyamalan's orchestration of mood and terror is as adroit as ever"^[4] .

The film also was noted for Bryce Dallas Howard's exceptional performance as Ivy Walker, which received award nominations from the Online Film Critics Society and others. The soundtrack by Newton-Howard has also been widely praised.

[edit] Box office

Despite bad reviews and a rapidly falling off box-office the film ended up pulling in a modest $114 million USD, although when compared to its $71.6 million production cost and $40 million advertising campaign it probably failed to make a profit on its opening run. It went on to collect another $140 million worldwide.

[edit] Cast

As is usual in his films, M. Night Shyamalan is seen in a brief cameo. In one of the final scenes his voice is heard for a time and his reflection can be seen.

Spoiler warning: Possible spoilers in the character listing

Actor	Role
Jayne Atkinson	Tabitha Walker
Adrien Brody	Noah Percy
Frank Collison	Victor
Jesse Eisenberg	Jamison
Brendan Gleeson	August Nicholson
Judy Greer	Kitty Walker
Charlie Hofheimer	Kevin
Bryce Dallas Howard	Ivy Walker
William Hurt	Edward Walker
Cherry Jones	Mrs. Clack
John Christopher Jones	Robert Percy
Joaquin Phoenix	Lucius Hunt
Michael Pitt	Finton Coin
M. Night Shyamalan	Guard at Desk
Liz Stauber	Beatrice
Sigourney Weaver	Alice Hunt
Celia Weston	Vivian Percy
Charlie McDermott	10-year-old boy

[edit] Trivia

When this film went into production it was originally titled The Woods. It was changed because a film directed by Lucky McKee, The Woods, already had that title.^[5]
A copy of the script for this movie was stolen over a year before it released, so the film was widely "pre"-reviewed on several Internet film sites.^[6]^[7]
The film seems to have had a change made to its ending some time after they finished filming. Actors were called back to the set 5 months later to film a scene that was added to give the film an ending where Ivy gets back to the village and her love Lucius. ^[8]^[9]
Simon & Schuster, the publishers of 1995 children's book Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix, claimed that the film had stolen ideas from the book's story, which features a village whose inhabitants pretend to be living in the 1830s when the year is actually 1996.^[10]
In the 2006 film Scary Movie 4, The Village is parodied in many ways, making this the third M. Night Shyamalan film to be spoofed in the Scary Movie series. The first was The Sixth Sense (Scary Movie), followed by Signs (Scary Movie 3).
Director M. Night Shyamalan plays the head guard at the Walker Wildlife Preserve. Though he never appears directly on screen, he has spoken lines and his reflection is briefly visible in the glass front of a cabinet.
An episode of Robot Chicken briefly features a sketch about twist endings including the final plot revelation from The Village. At the end, Ivy gets run over by Kevin's Land Rover which she calls "a really weak twist".