As part of the publicity for The Village, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan apparently pretended to have a falling out with the makers of a supposed documentary about the new movie that aired on the Sci Fi Channel. The falling out wasn't real and the documentary turned out to be a three-hour infomercial. News outlets have reported that the American press is angry about the "hoax." In addition, a Disney representative reportedly asked critics at press screenings not to reveal the new movie's plot twists.

Maybe the clumsy p.r. explains why the reviews of The Village have been so harsh. The critics focus almost exclusively on the plot, insisting like children that they weren't taken in or scared, and like undergraduates that they're far too sophisticated for Shyamalan's pretentious and either simplistic or indecipherable "message" or "allegory." (The latter term is used as a pejorative synonym for moralizing though without comparing the movie, favorably or otherwise, to such undeniable classics of allegory as the Romance of the Rose, The Faerie Queene, or The Pilgrim's Progress.) The booby prize may go to Chris Kaltenbach who carps in the Baltimore Sun that the setting anachronistically looks like 16th-century Salem, Massachusetts, but altogether a more obtuse set of reviews, a more gruesome compendium of sarcastic "wit," would be hard to fake.

Is being able to guess the movie's surprise entirely a bad thing? First off, a surprise works only once. And if it's essential to enjoying the movie, wouldn't that mean that the more successful the surprise the more disposable the movie after the first viewing? To me, the foreseeability of the twist at the end of The Village indicates that it's plausible.

The story takes place circa 1897 in a rural Pennsylvania community the elders of which have arranged an anxious truce with the malevolent creatures (referred to as Those We Don't Speak Of) inhabiting the surrounding woods. The elders require villagers to request permission to go into the woods, or through the woods to the "wicked" towns beyond, which is always denied, even to get medicine not otherwise available. When the creatures make a spate of attacks on the settlement's livestock, the elders hold meetings to discover who has roused the enemy. But The Village isn't like Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," in which there has to be a scapegoat. Shyamalan's elders, who have raised their children to speak what they seem to think of as a wholesome version of English, without slang or even contractions, in which it's all but impossible to speak deviously, want everybody to be safe and happy. The question is whether the elders can remain mild-mannered and still enforce their better way of life.