The plot secret involves the nature of the creatures, but also the reason the elders have formed this community out in the woods. They have a specific reason, as do the transcendentalists in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance (modeled on Brook Farm), and the escapees in As You Like It, for that matter. It strikes me as believable enough, given the history of such American utopias as New Harmony and the Oneida Community. My own sister moved to rural Vermont in the 1980s in order to live where she wouldn't have to lock her car; she ended up living in a cabin a mile's walk through the woods from where she parked it.
The explanation in The Village also justifies the inauthenticity of the movie's recreation of the 19th-century setting, but at the same time this is where Shyamalan has brought criticism down on his own head. He cantilevers that explanation against too much of the running time of the movie during which you feel veteran performers like William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson, and Cherry Jones conveying more information than you can make sense of, without creating adequate characterizations. (The elders would be more memorable if the movie were more allegorical, i.e., if each one represented a singled-out human trait.) You just think they're overacting, and even once you know what's behind their efforts, it's not as if you can replay the movie to appreciate the nuances. This aspect might be better on second viewing but doesn't encourage you to give the movie a second shot.
That isn't the case with The Sixth Sense (1999), which gets to you because the boy's extra-sensory perception stands for the vulnerability of childhood. His sixth sense makes him a little clairvoyant detective, and what he exposes--a crime against a girl by her own mother--shadows your concern for the boy whose heroic power is both a gift and an affliction. He's deeply spooked, and the movie makes you feel for him as intensely as his own mother does. (Toni Collette's intent naturalistic acting thus works in this ominous supernatural context far better than in the friendly but thin realism of About a Boy.) I was surprised by the ending of The Sixth Sense, but I was already securely in the movie's thrall, held by Haley Joel Osment's rapt, reluctant-sibylline performance.
With Unbreakable (2000) Shyamalan tried to do it again with adult stars playing grown-up traumatized children. But the situation doesn't tap into our remembered vulnerability as effectively, perhaps because the concept of two adult men discovering their comic-book opposition--one an unlikely and hesitant superhero, the other a villain whose ironic quest is to get the superhero to fulfill his role so that his own twisted life will make sense--is too "nifty," not primal enough, to be played straight in the manner of The Sixth Sense. The incongruity of Bruce Willis's depressive loser coming to accept that he's invincible isn't developed and so can't work in the movie's favor. We keep getting the giggles but the movie is too muted to know what to do with them. (At the train station, for example, when Willis has visions caused by criminals brushing against him, he seems to wait for a really good one before acting, like a fisherman throwing puny trout back into the stream of consciousness. What follows is standard serial-killer movie suspense.)
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