Written and Directed by M. Night. Shyamalan
A modern day fairy tail from the director of A Sixth Sense and The Village. Paul Giamatti takes the lead in what for many has turned out to be M. Night’s first box office clanger.
Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) is the mild mannered building supervisor whose mundane and simple life is thrown into chaos by the arrival of Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a mystical creature from the realms of bedtime stories. Banding together the other characters from the surrounding apartments, Heep is determined to get Story back to her magical world.
Now, that sounds like a load of shit right? Well, you’ve probably read a few reviews on this already, and I’m guessing the vast majority of them would have been negative, as this film seemed to mark the end of M. Night Shyamalan’s love affair with Hollywood. Or to be more precise, Hollywood’s love affair with him.
In fact, when it first came out, Lady in the Water was, on the whole, slaughtered by critics and box office take alike. But let me tell you this, they’re all wrong! It’s a magical film, truly magical. Shyamalan brings us a modern day fairy tale for grown ups, set in a wonderfully realised world, full of larger than life characters. And it’s not without humour either, the inclusion of a film critic as one of the secondary characters might have put some industry people’s backs up, and M. Night casting himself in on of the more key roles would have done the same, yet he pulls it off.
Plus, it’s all done with such breathtaking skill, you can easily forgive any minor objections a viewer may have. To put it simply, it’s movies like this that make me love films. Any film where you can suspend disbelief and just lose yourself completely in the directors imagination is fine with me. In fact, it’s what I crave.
So do yourself a favour, forget what you may have heard and give this film a shot. Because if you like movies, real movies, where you can forget about your life for a couple of hours, then this is the film for you.
Masterful and spellbinding, a misunderstood gem.