PLOT: A small remote village is terrorized by creatures that live in the woods. 

Here’s another movie that I have avoided after being spoiled. I’ll say the reason why I have avoided this movie was more about the reception of the film rather than having the ending spoiled, but all the same, I never watched it until now. 16 years after the hype has died down, I’ll say that it’s not as terrible as most would leave you to believe, but I wouldn’t call it great by any means. It boasts a great cast and the ending could’ve worked better if it were better executed, but it wasn’t a terrible watch. 

The Village is a story of a puritan-style village, completely isolated from the outside world. The woods are supposedly haunted by creatures that threaten anyone who leaves the friendly confines of their small town. When a young man is stabbed by one of their own, a blind woman must traverse the woods to get medicine from a nearby town. 

The Village is the beginning of what most would consider M. Night Shyamalan’s backslide. His three previous films The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs were all liked if not loved. I can see in 2004, coming off these three, that this one would be a disappointment. Watching this for the first time now, it’s not so bad. The movie could do with a little more mystery; like, maybe there should be some sort of uncovering of what’s really going on by one of the main characters, rather than just a huge info dump by William Hurt at the end. The whole reveal is never really the conflict of the film itself, so it just winds up feeling a bit inconsequential. It doesn’t make it a bad film, but it just makes it feel like this movie was written backwards, with the twist informing everything else that happens before it. 

Overall Rating: 6 out of 10