What The Village concerns itself with, is a village in the middle of some woods or other, and the folks what live there are all big fans of Arthur Miller, specifically The Crucible. They just love that wacky dialogue, and even though The Village takes place a couple centuries later, these folks still want to be speaking just like in the play about Winona Ryder gets burned for shoplifting or something.

It's kinda like if, a hundred years from now, someone made a film about an English town set in 1979 but had them all talking like in A Midsummer Nights Dream, on account of Shakespeare was English and also "historical".

Shyamalan's a smart cat, though, and knows full well that you'll be mocking the dialogue right up until the last ten minutes, and then you'll feel all stupid.

Pre-twist, it rattles along in the vein of a weird, very well acted, occasionally very tense chiller. Post-twist, it emerges as some kind of non-comedic Pleasantville, a parable about how progress should be welcomed, rather than feared.

To be honest, The Duke is conflicted as all hell. Thematically, I admire the points being made in The Village, the stuff about the cruelty inherent in keeping folks from the truth, coupled with the love that goes into those decisions in the first place.

Unfortunately, this twist what serves to ensure the film becomes weightier around the skull than you might have assumed, also means that subsequent viewings can only become wearying, patience-testing affairs.

The Sixth Sense, for example, worked brilliantly on repeat viewings, because everything was put together with such precision. The tension still worked, because although one element of the tale was eventually revealed as fraudulent, the rest of it was still credible.

It was still possible to be freaked asunder when that lass showed up in the tent and then started drooling. Even after you knew the twist, those scenes still maintained their power.

I forget what the twist was. Something about Haley Joel Osmond was a robot, I think, and then went under the sea to look for Pinocchio. Something to that effect.

The Village, though, renders itself impotent, ensures that the tension mentioned earlier, those scenes what got the old blood-pump racing and so on, become pointless.

The whole thing, in fact, becomes crushingly pointless.

It's like those web-sites what have the obstacle illusions or whatever, where you have to stare at a picture for a minute or two and then, just as you're saying about this is ridiculous, there ain't nothing there, suddenly a face flashes onscreen and scares the shit out of you. It's a whole heap of the fun, but when you know there's a face about to come up and then a scream, the exercise becomes fruitless.