Review of Lady in the Water

Just for the record, I am not a Shyamalan detractor, nor am I a fan. I loved The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, and there were good things about Signs and The Village, even if the films were deeply flawed. It's just that to me after The Village, the rest of Shyamalan's resume ranged to strange to dire. Whether I loved his first couple of films and didn't care/hate the rest has nothing to do with racism, contrary to some of the threads I've come across on his message board.

It's just that it is sad that such a promising director, who showed that he could tell a story effectively had either become sloppy or had tried to do many things at once and consequently the respective film buckled(which was the case with The Village). Lady in the Water is not Shyamalan's worst, for me that's The Happening with The Last Airbender not far off, but having seen all his films I do think it is his strangest.

Lady in the Water does have its good things though. The score is suitably haunting, Paul Giamatti is a wonderful actor and while deserving of a stronger character and less contrived script he does give his all into the performance and it shows. But the best thing about Lady in the Water was the beautifully done animated prologue.

However, that is all the praise I can give. The rest of the acting is either unimpressive or awful. Bryce Dallas Howard was fantastic in The Village and she is good as an actress, but while like Giamatti she tries her best her character is nowhere near as poignant or as interesting as that of hers in The Village. Jeffrey Wright and Bob Babalan are wasted, and Shyamalan himself makes an appearance that feels very thrown in and at the end of the day is just a form of annoyance.

Scripting-wise Lady in the Water all feels very contrived and overly-silly, the pacing becomes increasingly sluggish in the second half which further suffers from trying to do too much and the characters consist of either stereotypes(the film critic tenant, the kid who could decipher codes from cereal packets and the philosopher of future importance) or fantasy "mythological" clichés with grass-haired werewolves for scrunts and twig monkeys for the tarturic that have no depth to them. The scenery and lighting are okay if not exactly dynamic but the camera angles look slip-shod and lazy, with over-use of half-face shots and focusing on nothing.

But it is the story that sinks Lady in the Water. The premise was actually interesting, but the execution feels very muddled. I didn't find anything interesting about the nymph's story, it suffers from trying to cram too much and the mythological characters are rather daft. After watching the film, I was saddened at how the director of a thought-provoking and atmospheric movie like The Sixth Sense could've gone to a artificial and self-indulgent movie like this one. By all means, Shyamalan has done worse, but this is definitely not his finest hour. 3/10 Bethany Cox