JDC Burnhil
“Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. … 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.”
(Roger Ebert, Review of The Village, 2004)
In most tellings of The Rise and Fall of M. Night Shyamalan, The Village (2004) is treated as Where It Started to Go Wrong. The cause, according to these theorists, was the great success the auteur director had had with films that incorporating a “twist,” such as The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000); the effect was that he got cocky and made a film around a twist without realizing that twist was “witless.”
After studying the film and many viewers’ responses over many years, I’ve come to a different hypothesis. I believe that the dislike expressed for the “twists” (of which there are really three, not just one) is what doctors call “referred pain” – pain that is caused in one location, but felt in another. The actual cause of most viewer dissatisfaction is a set of much subtler missteps – coincidentally, also three in number.
