The Village
Theatrical release poster
Directed byM. Night Shyamalan
Written byM. Night Shyamalan
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyRoger Deakins
Edited byChristopher Tellefsen
Music byJames Newton Howard
Production
companies
Distributed byBuena Vista Pictures Distribution[1]
Release dates
  • July 26, 2004 (2004-07-26) (premiere)
  • July 30, 2004 (2004-07-30) (United States)
Running time
108 minutes[3]
CountryUnited States[1]
LanguageEnglish
Budget$60 million[4]
Box office$256.7 million[4]

The Village (marketed as M. Night Shyamalan's The Village) is a 2004 American period thriller film[4] written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. It stars Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, and Brendan Gleeson. The film is about a village whose population lives in fear of creatures inhabiting the woods beyond it, referred to as "Those We Don't Speak Of."

The Village received mixed reviews, with many critics expressing disappointment with the twist ending.[5][6] James Newton Howard was nominated for Best Original Score at the 77th Academy Awards. The film was a financial success as it grossed $256.7 million worldwide against a $60 million production budget.[7]

Plot

In 19th-century Pennsylvania, a small, remote village lives in fear of nameless humanoid-creatures that inhabit the surrounding woods. Staffed watchtowers and tall poles with oil lamps line the village perimeter for protection. Also, the color red is banned, as it attracts the creatures.

Following a young villager's death, Lucius Hunt requests, and is denied, the elders' permission to travel through the woods and retrieve medical supplies from "the towns" to avoid similar tragedies. Later, Lucius' widowed mother, Alice, questions his wanting to visit "the towns," which the elders describe as wicked.

The elders appear to have secrets, and each keeps a locked black box containing unknown items. It is learned that as long as villagers avoid the woods, the creatures stay away. Lucius secretly ventures into the woods, though he later tells the elders and claims it was safe. Soon after, skinned animal carcasses appear in the village. One night, the creatures enter the village, leaving red paint splashes on people's doors as a warning.

Elder Edward Walker's daughter, Kitty, fancies Lucius, but he loves Ivy, Kitty's blind younger sister. Kitty marries someone else, which allows Ivy and Lucius to become betrothed. Before they marry, Noah Percy, a young man with an apparent developmental disability, stabs Lucius out of jealousy. As the elders consider Noah's fate, he remains locked in a small building.

Edward defies the other elders by sending Ivy, accompanied by two young males, through the forest to retrieve medicine for Lucius, who clings to life. Before Ivy leaves, Edward tells her about his wealthy father's murder. He then admits the creatures are actually the elders disguised as the monsters to perpetuate the legend so they can scare and deter younger members from leaving. In the woods, the two boys become frightened and abandon Ivy. She continues on alone and is stalked by a creature, which she tricks into fatally falling into a deep hole as it attacks. The creature is Noah wearing a costume he found hidden under floorboards. Meanwhile, Edward and his wife, Tabitha, unlock their box, which contains photos of themselves and the other elders when they were much younger. The group is standing outside a modern-day counseling center, revealing that it is actually the early 21st century.

Ivy climbs over a high wall. On the other side, she encounters a Walker Wildlife Reserve park ranger, who is shocked that she came from the woods. Ivy gives him a list of medicines she must acquire. The ranger gathers the medication without telling his supervisor, nor does he mention Ivy.

It is learned that Edward Walker, a former history professor, founded the village over two decades earlier. He recruited people he met at a grief counseling clinic to isolate themselves from societal violence. Edward's family fortune funds the wildlife reserve, built the village inside it, and even paid the government to make it a no-fly zone.

Ivy returns to the village with the medication, never seeing the modern world. The elders' boxes are shown to contain mementos and other items from their earlier lives; their voices are heard recalling past traumas. The elders gather around Lucius's bed after learning that Ivy has returned and that a monster (Noah) was killed. Edward comforts Noah's grieving parents by saying that his death will allow them to continue the farce that creatures inhabit the woods.

Cast

Production

The film was originally titled The Woods, but the name was changed because a film in production by director Lucky McKee, The Woods (2006), already had that title.[8] Like other Shyamalan productions, this film had high levels of secrecy surrounding it, to protect the expected twist ending that became a Shyamalan trademark. Despite that, the script was stolen over a year before the film was released, prompting many "pre-reviews" of the film on several Internet film sites[9][10] and much fan speculation about plot details. The village set in the film was built in its entirety in one field outside Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. An adjacent field contained an on-location temporary sound stage.[11] Production on the film started in October 2003, with delays because some scenes needing fall foliage could not be shot because of a late fall season. Principal photography was wrapped up in mid-December of that year. In April and May 2004, several of the lead actors were called back to the set. Reports noted that this seemed to have something to do with a change to the film's ending,[12] and, in fact, the film's final ending differs from the ending in a stolen version of the script that surfaced a year earlier; the script version ends after Ivy climbs over the wall and gets help from a truck driver, while the film version has Ivy meeting a park ranger and scenes where she returns to the village.[13]

Music

Soundtrack

The Village
Film score by
James Newton Howard
ReleasedJuly 27, 2004
GenreSoundtrack
Length42:29
LabelHollywood
ProducerJames Newton Howard
James Newton Howard chronology
Hidalgo
(2004)		 The Village
(2004)		 Collateral
(2004)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
SoundtrackNet
allmusic
Filmtracks

The film's score was composed by James Newton Howard, and features solo violinist Hilary Hahn. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, but lost to Finding Neverland.

Track listing
  1. "Noah Visits"
  2. "What Are You Asking Me?"
  3. "The Bad Color"
  4. "Those We Don't Speak Of"
  5. "Will You Help Me?"
  6. "I Cannot See His Color"
  7. "Rituals"
  8. "The Gravel Road"
  9. "Race to Resting Rock"
  10. "The Forbidden Line"
  11. "The Vote"
  12. "It Is Not Real"
  13. "The Shed Not to Be Used"

Release

Box office

The Village made $50.7 million during its opening weekend.[14] The film grossed $114 million in the U.S., and $142 million in international markets. Its worldwide box office totalled $256 million, the tenth highest grossing PG-13 movie of 2004.[4]

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator website, the film has an approval rating of 43% based on 219 reviews and an average rating of 5.4/10. The site's critics' consensus reads, "The Village is appropriately creepy, but Shyamalan's signature twist ending disappoints."[6] At Metacritic, the film holds a score of 44 out of 100 based on 40 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[5] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "C" on scale of A+ to F.[15]

Roger Ebert gave the film one star and wrote: "The Village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn ... To call the ending an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It was all a dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore."[16] Ebert named the film the tenth worst film of 2004 and subsequently put it on his "Most Hated" list.[17][18] There were also comments that the film, while raising questions about conformity in a time of "evil," did little to "confront" those themes.[19] Slate's Michael Agger commented that Shyamalan was continuing in a pattern of making "sealed-off movies that [fall] apart when exposed to outside logic."[20]

The movie had a number of admirers. Critic Jeffrey Westhoff commented that though the film had its shortcomings, these did not necessarily render it a bad movie, and that "Shyamalan's orchestration of mood and terror is as adroit as ever."[21] Philip Horne of The Daily Telegraph in a later review noted "this exquisitely crafted allegory of American soul-searching seems to have been widely misunderstood."

The film has received some additional positive reviews since its release including Emily St. James of Vox and Chris Evangelista of SlashFilm who thought it was one of Shyamalan's best films,[22][23] Adam Chitwood of Collider who praised the ending, the performances of Howard, Phoenix, and Hurt, and the cinematography,[24] and Kayleigh Donaldson of Syfy Wire who praised the cinematography, and said, "...[the film] stands as one of the strongest representations of Shyamalan’s ethos, for better or worse."[25] Carlos Morales of IGN argued that the film was misunderstood at the time of its release because it was mismarketed as a horror film, and also because of audience expectations that had been built up by Shyamalan's three previous films. "The real twist was that the movie they wanted wasn't the one Shyamalan made."[26]

In France, the Cahiers du cinéma praised the movie, putting it in second place (tie) in their 2004 annual top list. Some other French film critics shared their enthusiasm, such as Le Monde, which described the film as a "horrific post-9/11 fable",[27] "a political film disguised as fantasy, a work of great beauty shot through with primal anxieties and universal aspirations".[28] But the general reception of the film remains mixed: Libération called it a "Jansenist turnip", which "pretends to worry about the isolationism of its ass-benitent heroes, but shows above all that it understands their fears and feels sympathy for them";[29] and Télérama described the filmmaker as "once again taking himself for Hitchcock".[30]

Accolades

2005 ASCAP Film and Television Music Awards
2004 Academy Awards (Oscars)
2005 10th Empire Awards
2005 Evening Standard British Film Awards
2005 MTV Movie Awards
2005 Motion Picture Sound Editors (Golden Reel Award)
  • Nominated – Best Sound Editing in a Feature: Music, Feature Film — Thomas S. Drescher
2004 Online Film Critics Society Awards
  • Nominated – Best Breakthrough Performance — Bryce Dallas Howard
2005 Teen Choice Awards
  • Nominated – Choice Movie Scary Scene — Bryce Dallas Howard, Ivy Walker waits at the door for Lucius Hunt.
  • Nominated – Choice Movie: Thriller

Other honors

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

The soundtrack was widely praised, and was nominated by the American Film Institute as one of the Best Film Scores[32] and the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Plagiarism allegation

Simon & Schuster, publishers of the 1995 young adult book Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix, claimed that the film had taken ideas from the book.[33] The plot of Shyamalan's movie had several similarities to the book. They both involve a 19th-century village, which is actually a park in the present day, have young heroines on a search for medical supplies, and both have adult leaders bent on keeping the children in their village from discovering the truth.[33]

No lawsuit was ever filed over the similarity.[34]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 "The Village (2004)". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. Retrieved September 14, 2019.
  2. 1 2 "The Village (2004)- Financial Information". The Numbers. Retrieved March 6, 2021.
  3. ↑ "The Village (12A)". British Board of Film Classification. July 26, 2004. Retrieved August 1, 2016.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "The Village (2004)". Box Office Mojo.
  5. 1 2 "The Village Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved October 20, 2019.
  6. 1 2 "The Village (2004)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved October 20, 2019.
  7. ↑ Morris, Wesley (August 24, 2020). "Plot Twist! Why 2004 Was a Surprising Year for Movies". The New York Times.
  8. ↑ Davis, Scott W. "The Village - Movie Review". Horror Express. Retrieved March 14, 2022.
  9. ↑ "Pre-review of The Village". Geocities. Archived from the original on October 26, 2009. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
  10. ↑ "Pre-review of The Village at". Horrorlair.com. February 18, 2007. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
  11. ↑ "The Village (2004) FAQ". IMDb. Retrieved March 14, 2022. Where exactly was the movie filmed? Did they use historical buildings or did they build everything?
  12. ↑ "More views of The Village – aerial". Geocities. Archived from the original on August 20, 2009. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
  13. ↑ "The Village Script – Dialogue Transcript". Script-o-rama. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
  14. ↑ "The Village Has a Thrilling Start".
  15. ↑ "Cinemascore". Archived from the original on December 20, 2018. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  16. ↑ Ebert, Roger (July 19, 2004). "The Village movie review & film summary (2004)". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved October 20, 2019.
  17. ↑ "Top 10 Worst Movies of the 2000's - Roger Ebert Review". YouTube. Archived from the original on November 14, 2021. Retrieved November 15, 2020.
  18. ↑ Ebert, Roger (August 11, 2005). "Ebert's Most Hated". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved October 20, 2019.
  19. ↑ "The Reel Deal: The Village". Oregon Herald. March 16, 2012. Archived from the original on January 6, 2014. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
  20. ↑ Yglesias, Matthew (July 30, 2004). "Village Idiot". Slate. Retrieved March 14, 2022.
  21. ↑ Northwest Herald's The Village review
  22. ↑ St. James, Emily (January 23, 2019). "M. Night Shyamalan's The Village is an underrated masterpiece". Vox. Retrieved March 14, 2022.
  23. ↑ Evangelista, Chris (August 1, 2017). "The Unpopular Opinion: 13 Years Later, 'The Village' Stands as One of M. Night Shyamalan's Best Movies". SlashFilm. Retrieved March 14, 2022.
  24. ↑ Chitwood, Adam (July 30, 2019). "In Defense of M. Night Shyamalan's 'The Village'". Collider. Retrieved September 2, 2019.
  25. ↑ Donaldson, Kayleigh (July 30, 2019). "M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN'S THE VILLAGE IS A MASTERPIECE AND YOU CAN'T CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE". Syfy Wire. Retrieved September 2, 2019.
  26. ↑ Morales, Carlos (August 17, 2019). "The Village: M Night Shyamalan's misunderstood love story". IGN. Retrieved March 14, 2022.
  27. ↑ "Une fable horrifique de l'après-11-septembre". Le Monde.fr (in French). August 17, 2004. Retrieved June 13, 2023.
  28. ↑ "La cité de l'indispensable peur". Le Monde.fr (in French). August 17, 2004. Retrieved June 13, 2023.
  29. ↑ "Shyamalan persiste en père la morale". Libération (in French). Retrieved June 13, 2023.
  30. ↑ "Le Village (Thriller) : la critique Télérama". www.telerama.fr (in French). August 21, 2004. Retrieved June 13, 2023.
  31. ↑ "AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores Nominees" (PDF). Retrieved August 6, 2016.
  32. ↑ "HollywoodBowlBallot" (PDF). Retrieved March 12, 2013.
  33. 1 2 "Stolen idea in The Village?". Film.guardian.co.uk. August 10, 2004. Retrieved March 12, 2013.
  34. ↑ Kamberg, Mary-Lane (December 15, 2013). Margaret Peterson Haddix. Rosen Publishing Group. pp. 41–42. ISBN 9781477717721. Retrieved March 10, 2016.
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