The Village: A Hopeful, Sincere Love Story That’s More Than Its Twist By Twenty years on from its release, ‘s paints a haunting and tragic picture of fear and ignorance that is broken through by love. It features a fantastic cast that includes Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson, Judy Greer, Jesse Eisenberg, and Sigourney Weaver. The story sees a man spark a chain of devastating events when he dares to venture beyond the confines of his secluded Pennsylvania village.
The aftermath will lead to shocking revelations for the community and a tragedy that caused their isolation unearthed. The problem with M. Night Shyamalan’s early films, and indeed still today, is that there’s an expectation.
There will be a twist, and how good the film is will likely be judged by how smug or frustrated people feel about figuring it out. In those earlier films, that reaction was at its most volatile. Rather than look at everything else his films did well, the accusation was consistently put forward that Shyamalan was a twist fiend.
That he simply couldn’t do without them. The man himself did little to dispel that with films immediately following . However, there seemed to be a misunderstanding about what constitutes a twist.
2004’s The Village felt like the first of his films to be unfairly tarred with that twist fiend brush. And I sit here knowing I was as guilty of it as anyone else. I vividly remember standing in line for another film a.