The Village (2004)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
When a willful young man tries to venture beyond his sequestered Pennsylvania hamlet, his actions set off a chain of chilling incidents that will alter the community forever.
23 connections found
View:
23 films that influenced The Village
What critics say influenced The Village
Speaking of the derivative aspects of The Village, you'd be better off watching Don't Look Now (1973), The Blair Witch Project (1999) and any episode of The Twilight Zone, chased by a Fantasy Island.
The first sight of one of the red cloaked wood creatures recalls the dwarf of Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" and one characters death tableau evokes St. George's slain dragon as imagined by Maurice Sendak.
That may well be true but if I had to compare his films to Kings books, then "The Sixth Sense" is "Carrie", "Unbreakable" is "The Shining" and "The Village" is "The Tommyknockers".
Playing a blind girl who must gather the courage to battle unseen fears isn't new-- Audrey Hepburn was probably the best in the 1967 Wait Until Dark --yet, the talented Howard 's naturally blithe and spunky personality brings her own freshness to the character.
Howard, the real life daughter of director Ron Howard, is fabulous is Ivy and parts of the film remind me of the Audrey Hepburn thriller Wait Until Dark, about a blind woman fending off bad guys.
That may well be true but if I had to compare his films to Kings books, then "The Sixth Sense" is "Carrie", "Unbreakable" is "The Shining" and "The Village" is "The Tommyknockers".
Advertisement
Speaking of the derivative aspects of The Village, you'd be better off watching Don't Look Now (1973), The Blair Witch Project (1999) and any episode of The Twilight Zone, chased by a Fantasy Island.
We can tell you there are moments reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project and scenes that recall Witness.
I was a little skeptical about “The Village,” especially after being subjected to a three hour mock documentary by Nathaniel Kahn (“My Architect: A Son’s Journey”) that, a la “The Blair Witch Project,” attempts to present an intimate, behind the scenes look into Shymalan and the secrecy shrouding his work.
The list of movies that feature blind characters is long: Charlie Chaplin's 1931 "City Lights," "Butterflies Are Free" (1972), "Jennifer 8" (1992), "Scent of a Woman" (1992) and the 2000 "Dancer in the Dark" are just a few that come to mind.
Everyone speaks as if they had studied "Friendly Persuasion."
It was shot by the fine cinematographer Roger Deakins (known for his work with the Coen brothers; he was also the director of photography on Martin Scorsese's marvelous "Kundun").
Advertisement
(To this day, I get annoyed when I see articles that spell out the twist in Shyamalan's splendid 1999 thriller "The Sixth Sense"; surely there are a few of you out there who haven't seen it yet.)
But as a writer, he's becoming a parody of himself: Eager to top the climactic twist of The Sixth Sense, he has masterminded three subsequent movies in which (unlike Sense) the "gotcha!" endings seem to be the only reason for their existence.
When this works -as it did in The Sixth Sense - the payoff can be immense.
I loved both ‘The Sixth Sense” and “Signs” True enough, I didn’t like “Unbreakable”, but even that was preferable to what I witnessed on screen in the form of “The Village”.
With The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, Shyamalan created new and glorious cinematic experiences, twisting known conventions in ways I had never seen, taking huge risks and having them pay off, throwing all of our preconceptions to the wind in the process.
In The Sixth Sense , red announced the approach of the supernatural; in The Village, it announces Shyamalan's debt to not only the master, but also to greats like Vittorio De Sica and Nicholas Roeg.
Even the quietest, character-driven dialogue scenes are overwhelmed by the music; to get an idea of the effect, imagine watching a scene from Bergmans "Autumn Sonata" with the soundtrack for "Koyaanisqatsi" blasting in the background and drowning out everything.