Something's in the woods

Writer-director M Night Shyamalan specialises in films that are all MacGuffin - he keeps his audience in a metaphorical as well as literal darkness. In The Sixth Sense (1999), Bruce Willis finds things to do in Philadelphia when you're dead, and we - hopefully - don't twig until the final reel. In Unbreakable (2000), Willis is, by way of contrast, an immortalist, and once again we're treated to a shock of realisation as he's flushed out by the malevolent Samuel L Jackson.

In Signs (2002), the plot twists are rather more flagrantly signposted, and it would take a truly credulous individual to make it through to the end without having sussed the nastiness of the hydrophobic aliens.

On the basis of these three films, Shyamalan is on a downward curve. He started out making good oldfashioned hokum with an adult sensibility, but with each hike in budget (and presumably as the delusions of the Dream Factory take hold), he seems to decline further into adolescent maundering.

The Sixth Sense actually makes for better viewing the second time, when you know that the Willis character is a revenant, and the film becomes about bereavement rather than the supernatural. (The same can't be said for the two others, which have little to tell us about the human condition, but plenty to reveal about their director's pet anxieties.)

Comes now The Village, shot on a 40-acre set in rural Pennsylvania, involving cast and crew in a bootcamp scenario whereby they were cut off from civilisation the better to realise the mentality and lifestyle of a late 19th-century sectarian community.

It's a promising and resonant idea. The US owes its character to just such schismatics - whether Puritans, Amish or Mormons, heading off into the wilderness so that they can live according to their conception of the good, free from the corrupting influences of the parent society.

This particular isolated community, however, boasts some fine film actors forced to survive on a diet of pure ham. Joaquin Phoenix takes the lead as Lucius Hunt, a strong, silent type, never happier than when sharpening a scythe. Lucius wishes to leave the community and travel through the encompassing woods so that he can fetch medicines from the enigmatic "towns" that lie beyond. There's one problem: the woods are full of "They who we do not name" - curious-ravening, spiny, bipedal beasts sporting red robes, who must be kept at bay by a circle of lit torches surrounding the community.

These bogey creatures prevent the younger villagers clearing off, and there are also the minatory warnings of the Elders about the outside world. Edward Walker (William Hurt) had his father murdered by thieves in the towns; Alice Hunt (Sigourney Weaver) had her husband similarly done in; August Nicholson (Brendan Gleeson) also lost his nearest and dearest to the depredations of the "civilised" world.

All of them keep mementos of their past locked up in steel boxes, should they ever waver in their commitment to remain within the 40-acre plot. Lucius's determination to enter the woods sets in train an escalating crisis, as the beasts in red come creeping between the houses, skinning pets and livestock, and leaving bloody claw marks on the lintels of their clapboard houses.

The plot motor is provided by the burgeoning love between Lucius and the blind Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard in her feature debut). Their betrothal sends the already unbalanced Noah Percy (Adrien Brody) right around the twist, and after he has attacked Lucius, Ivy's father succumbs to the inevitable and helps her to leave the village so she may fetch vital medicines from the towns.