M. Night Has Fallen

It was a dark and stormy you-know-what: Bryce Dallas Howard as the central figure in M. Night Shyamalan's Lady In The Water. Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

The man’s voice in the commercial couldn’t be any more portentous. “His movies have defied conventions,” he says before that crucial first dramatic pause, “challenged our beliefs … and explored the dark corners of our fears. Now … director M. Night Shyamalan shows us what lives under the water … and the nightmare that waits in your own backyard.”

The sensible answer to the last question would be fish and raccoons, respectively. But the stentorian tone of the TV commercials for Shyamalan’s new film, Lady in the Water, is meant to add a weightier air to the fleeting glimpses of a pale-skinned lady, a bespectacled schlep and a menacing beast.

What’s most unusual about the ad is how it emphasizes the reputation of the film’s writer, producer and director when most movie marketing promotes the stars and/or the story. Shyamalan is the selling point here, his name promising audiences more of what they savoured in The Sixth Sense and Signs, two of the most profitable thrillers of the past decade. The Philadelphia-raised filmmaker earned a reputation as a new master of suspense and the stylistic heir to Alfred Hitchcock. He’s cultivated this association with the intensity of his best scenes (like the basement siege in Signs, inspired in part by The Birds), his well-publicized perfectionism and his penchant for appearing in his own films. For all intents and purposes, Shyamalan is a brand, and since his last effort, The Village (2004) — a strange hybrid of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story and some forgotten episode of The Outer Limits — was a critical and commercial failure, Lady in the Water is a crucial test of that brand’s power.

It’s unlikely Lady in the Water could’ve been sold to audiences purely on the basis of its on-camera talent. Paul Giamatti is a marquee player when it comes to indie movies like Sideways and American Splendor, but when he’s in the big leagues, he still has to stand next to more handsome people like Russell Crowe (in Cinderella Man). Lady in the Water co-star Bryce Dallas Howard earned major buzz when the little-known actress was cast in The Village. But following that up with the lead role in Manderlay — the latest carnival of cruelty by Danish auteur Lars von Trier — didn’t get her any closer to the A-list.

Haunted figure: Haley Joel Osment in Shyamalan's breakthrough film, The Sixth Sense. Courtesy Buena Vista Pictures.

Since his debut, The Sixth Sense (1999), became a surprise blockbuster — based largely on an ending that viewers were urged not to give away — Shyamalan has preferred not to let folks know much about the content of his films before they’re released. Indeed, the aura of mystery and the inevitable twist ending have become his defining characteristics.

Having seen Lady in the Water, I still have trouble describing the plot. Giamatti plays Cleveland Heap, the stuttering superintendent at a Philadelphia apartment complex. One night, a beautiful young woman (Howard) emerges from the pool. The details about how this “sea nymph” got here and what she needs to do are parceled out over the remainder of the movie’s 107-minute running time. There is much talk of an ancient Eastern myth about “the blue world” involving creatures with funny names like “narfs” and “scrunts.” (Shyamalan originally conceived Lady in the Water as a bedtime story for his daughters — the movie’s release coincides with the publication of a children’s book version.)

There is even a self-reflexive element to the narrative. Howard’s character is named Story and the plot is analyzed as it unfolds by a huffy film critic (played by Bob Balaban). An ungainly combination of The Princess Bride and Adaptation, Lady in the Water is a fairy tale that’s cheekily aware of its own tropes. And yet the characters themselves seem confused, uttering comments like “This is crazy” and “You have to believe this will make sense somehow.”

That the film ultimately doesn’t make sense posed a great challenge to the people responsible for luring you into the theatre. In The Man Who Heard Voices, a flattering new book about Shyamalan and the making of his new film, author Michael Bamberger depicts a scene in which Disney executives essentially pleaded with Shyamalan to make any other movie beside this one. Though his pictures had made the studio well over $1 billion in box office — even The Village made over $240 million US worldwide — Shyamalan was compelled to take his business elsewhere. Lady in the Water was made with Warner Brothers at an estimated budget of $75 million.

Lady in the Water demonstrates all the traits in Shyamalan’s artistic DNA. There’s the establishment of an ordinary milieu rich with portents. There’s the accumulation of details and characters that initially seem inconsequential but eventually take on vast importance. There’s an emotionally damaged yet noble male hero — Giamatti taking the place of Mel Gibson in Signs and Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. There’s the combination of eerie silences and the swelling strings and angelic voices in the score by James Newton Howard.

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. Photo Ethan Miller/Getty Images.

Then there are the shocks, which are rather more languorous than the quick-cut variety preferred by most suspense filmmakers. Indeed, the action in Shyamalan’s films often slows to a crawl right at the point of its greatest intensity — think of the scenes in which Willis battles a home intruder in a swimming pool in Unbreakable or the way Howard’s blind waif evades a red-cloaked villain in The Village. Slowness is Shyamalan’s specialty and he uses it remarkably well. But in Lady in the Water, the pace remains glacial. With his curiously high- and low-angle shots, cinematographer Christopher Doyle does what he can to add interest to the many scenes of people talking. Yet the moments that are meant to quicken your pulse are lost in a mad jumble of plot details.

Which leads us to his patented “gotcha!” ending. Lady in the Water has several of them. Shyamalan’s diminishing returns were already felt in The Village, when a series of big reveals made the plot strands seem increasingly ludicrous. While he loves mystery, Shyamalan hates to leave anything unexplained. Each aspect of his stories must eventually be fitted into a grand design. The trouble is, that strategy makes the creator seem superior to his creations. In Signs and The Village, the overbearing mechanics of the plot turned the characters into mere cogs.

As a result, everything feels so damn preordained. In this aspect, Shyamalan is less of a stylistic heir of Hitchcock than Rod Serling (though he lacks the best attributes of both). As compulsively tidy as his own storytelling could be, the creator of The Twilight Zone got to the “gotcha!” a hell of a lot faster. As for Hitchcock, he wasn’t nearly as eager to explain the things — like the avian invasion in The Birds — that gave his stories their power. Hitchcock loved a good MacGuffin — that is, any object or device that drove the action but was in and of itself irrelevant. What interested him was how his characters reacted to their predicaments and, most tellingly, how they treated each other. Jimmy Stewart’s erotic obsession in Vertigo or Cary Grant’s sadistic love games with Ingrid Bergman in Notorious represent unforgettable journeys into those “dark corners of our fears.” By contrast, Shyamalan is all too ready to yank his characters — and us — out of those places so he can show off his bigger plans.

When that plan is as tedious and mystifying as the one in Lady in the Water, the enterprise can’t help but feel like a shell game. Lacking both the suspense and the cunning that we associate with his work, Shyamalan’s latest film betrays his brand, an unforgivable sin in the movie marketplace. The only thing that might frighten you is his hubris. And that’s just not as scary as raccoons.

Lady in the Water opens July 21 across Canada.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto writer and the recent winner of a Western Magazine Award.

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