SHYAMALAN-TOBER: The Village (2004)

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CONTENT WARNING: Discussions of mental illness, violence, cults and harmful communal living, disabilities and neurological issues, bad depictions of mental illness, performers Joaquin Phoenix and Adrien Brody.

This week in our M. Night Shyamalan series, we’re examining a film that many consider his masterpiece, but in reality is both messy and problematic. There’s obvious missteps with a specific character that needed far more nuance than this movie allowed. More subtly, though, the romanticism of this film’s style confuses a haunting story, and leaves us wondering - does M. Night think this way of living is good? Healthy? It’s hard to say, and that left at least one of us with a really bad taste in their mouth. We dive deep this week with 2004’s The Village.

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Clips from The Village are © 2004 Touchstone Pictures. All rights reserved.

Intro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive.