 M. Night Shyamalan is the modern master of the high-concept thriller. He is also a mad scientist. A tinkerer. With each new film, he's gone back into his lab and concocted some new experiment in suspense storytelling. With The Village he shocks his most bold creation into life.
Shyamalan has always enjoyed playing the puppet master of our emotions. Don't kid yourself—he may be fascinated with the retooling of narrative structure, but ultimately, he's experimenting on us, the audience. Like Hitchcock before him, Shyamalan is the Great Manipulator. Manipulation is not a bad word to Shyamalan; rather, it's his raison d'etre. He loves it—he gets off on playing us like a marionette. Considering his four straight commercial successes (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village), it's safe to say we keep coming back for more. | |  | M. Night Shyamalan | HIS METHOD
Shyamalan applies a number of general principles to each film:
All of his films span approximately 100 minutes in length, from story start to story end (minus titles and credits). His narratives are structured in three 30-minute acts, followed by a 10-minute “Act Four” which acts primarily as a falling action. He always writes for a medium budget, even when the subject matter would suggest a bigger film. For example, in Signs, this alien-invasion thriller only contains a single alien. Shyamalan always keeps his stories contained—whether we find ourselves in a confined farmhouse in the modern day, or in a small village in 1897 rural Pennsylvania, he can escalate the conflict, tension and emotional attachment to our heroes that much more intensely with an intimate, as opposed to epic, approach.
He primarily writes thrillers, but in the style of a drama; he leaves out the action sequences, car chases, spacecraft landings, spectral ghost hauntings and shootouts that populate most thrillers. This may also relate to budget, or just his preference to write dramatic scenes, not action scenes. It definitely allows him to explore character and family dynamics over plot dynamics, although he still manages to drop in a solid framework of plot; in fact, one of his great skills as a writer is to hide active plot points within quiet dialogue scenes or seemingly mundane description. He is a master at knowing when to reveal tiny bits of information; this is only one reason why his films must be viewed more than once.
Another hallmark of Shyamalan's films is that his final acts tend to be only 10 to 15 minutes on film, which is short, considering his screenplays tend to be longer. The 1997 draft of The Sixth Sense that I read on the job for Dimension Films was 127 pages, while the finished film was 100 minutes, or 100 pages.
And it should also be noted that Shyamalan always plays a role in his films; homage to the onscreen cameos of his hero, Hitchcock, perhaps?
So those are the parameters he consistently sticks with, but what truly sets him apart is when and how he takes risks …
THE PROTAGONIST
Shyamalan's boldest choices often have to do with the identity of the protagonist, or "perceived hero" of the story. With The Sixth Sense we watch a ghost story for 100 minutes and are shocked to discover our hero is also a ghost; with Unbreakable we watch a superhero origin story for 100 minutes only to find out it was simultaneously a supervillain origin story. | | | The Village | In The Village, Shyamalan actually borrows a page from Hitchcock's Psycho when the initial protagonist of the story is essentially killed off early on. In this case, Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) is stabbed at the midpoint by the heretofore innocent "village idiot" Noah (Adrien Brody)—Lucius is not killed, but rather lay dying, and thus the unlikely blind girl Ivy (Bryce Howard) takes over as our hero. She must leave the village, traverse through the untrod forest and get medicines in "the towns," a location only seen by the elders of the village and only spoke of in harsh history lessons meant to scare children. Ivy may be blind but she’s quite capable of making it through a forest—the real threat is the creatures: razor-clawed, cloak-clad monsters who patrol the woods. So we not only have a new hero but we also have a new villain, Noah, who will contribute soon to the screenplay’s major misfire, as well as the foreboding, mysterious threat of the creatures which is expertly shown as an active source of conflict without being fully explained. | |  | Signs | THE CONCEPT
On the Signs DVD, Shyamalan talks about his process of choosing a concept to develop into a screenplay: “An idea must have meaning, suspense, emotion, humanity, global significance, a universal message … touching on some connection between people … and also be a great roller-coaster ride all the same. An idea that can hold all that without bending it too far takes a while to come up with.” So the question becomes: Is he bending his ideas too far?
The biggest structural experiment in The Village, the biggest of Shyamalan’s filmography, occurs on the level of concept. The film changes gears so abruptly it switches GENRES on us. For many moviegoers, this ending reversal didn’t work; they felt “cheated.” But Shyamalan supports it incredibly well in the film; where the story goes off track can be traced back to an earlier point … | |  | The Sixth Sense | END OF ACT TWO
Shyamalan consistently encounters story obstacles at the end of Act Two, what screenwriters and readers know of as generally falling in the page 80 to 90 range. In my original coverage on The Sixth Sense, my only real logic problem came from this point in the story: Cole, led by the ghost of a little girl, finds the videotape at the little girl's funeral which convicts the mother of the murder of her daughter. In addition to the ambiguity of the mother's motivation, I was troubled by the fact that the family members of the deceased girl are strangers. We haven't met them before; Cole and we, the reader/audience, have nothing invested in them.
Interestingly, I had a problem at this same juncture with his other three films. In Unbreakable, we finally get our would-be superhero's act of heroism against a villain—but this killer is a total stranger to us and Dunn, as are his victims ... again, we have nothing invested in them emotionally. Dunn overpowers the anonymous villain, and this display of strength suggests his skin may be impenetrable but it doesn’t clarify it, thus not answering that crucial Central Dramatic Question of “Is Dunn unbreakable?”
Now on to Signs, wherein the end of Act Two shows Mel Gibson's son having an asthma attack and seemingly ... dying? It's unclear. What is clear is that they are in an extreme amount of danger as the house is besieged by aliens. So they decide to turn the lights out and go to sleep! This beat exists only as a motivation to cut to Graham’s dream, the flashback to his wife’s last minutes of her life, to set up the climax. Shyamalan’s puppet master strings are showing, and the moment feels clunky.
Back to Ivy’s dangerous trek through Covington Woods in The Village. At minute 66 she enters the forest for her journey; at 70, in the first of three big reveals, we learn via flashback that the legend of the creatures is a farce. Ivy’s father Edward Walker (William Hurt) shows her the shed where the elders keep the creature costumes. This is a nice reversal, but by 83, as we near the end of Act Two, Ivy is running in terror from … a creature! A porcupine-like monster in a dark cloak, it looks exactly like the creature suits we were shown earlier. The fake ones.
It's here where I think Shyamalan runs into trouble; he tinkers too much, attempts an experiment that cannot work. You cannot tell the audience the monster doesn't exist, or rather, SHOW the audience that the monster is just a costume, then only a little more than 10 minutes later (or 10 pages of script later) yell out: "I lied, the monster's real now!" At least, you can’t if you expect them to believe it. That's going backward, and it's an explanation, both of which are narrative anathema to the relentless push forward of a thriller. Worst of all, it undermines the even bigger and better surprise to soon follow: no, not the revelation that the creature is merely Noah in costume (minute 87), which has no real significance to the story, but the big one, which first comes out at 91 when Edward opens up his secret box and reveals a picture of the elders that looks to be taken in the 70s: not the 1870s, the 1970s!
It’s not 1897, after all: It’s the modern day. The creatures, and indeed the entire turn-of-the-century village, was a farce, created to protect the younger generations from feeling the pain felt by the elders, who all lost loved ones to violent crimes in a major city. Cinema's ultimate unreliable narrator has manipulated us once again.
Now, whether or not you predicted this surprise (and this may depend upon your familiarity with The Twilight Zone, or even J.J. Abrams' black and white Rod Serling tribute episode of Felicity!), if you study the film you’ll see that it’s incredibly well-supported. But the problem is, the story is effectively over and yet it continues to drag on, moving into a flat and explanatory epilogue.
THE ENDING
Shyamalan never disappoints his eager fanbase by delivering his trademark: the BIG ending.
The Village delivers his biggest doozy yet. At minute 92 we cut to Ivy Walker coming in contact with a young man who looks to be a modern-day park ranger driving a jeep that's labeled "Walker Preserve!" We immediately understand that these turn-of-the-century settlers have been living on a pristine plot of land completely cut off from the modern world, kept secure by paid security personnel. And this works, but we still have looming questions (e.g., why don’t any planes ever fly over the village?, who employs the rangers?), so there’s a need for that explanatory epilogue, and thus, more need for that “bending” of the concept that Shyamalan tries to avoid.
In having removed the antagonist and slowly wrapping up tiny loose ends but not advancing the story, this final act sticks out as the least bold choice in a risky script and ensures that the talky epilogue deteriorates the impact of the big ending. (By contrast, The Sixth Sense’s famous ending is not an epilogue, but rather Malcolm Crowe’s active internal climax: This beat shows Malcolm not only realizing he is dead but reconciling with his estranged wife. The film ends seconds later.)
One wonders if Shyamalan had removed the creature fake-out scene at the end of Act Two, showed the big “modern day” reveal and immediately cut to black, perhaps to some end titles for a bit of explanation, if the film would have forged a greater impact?
My personal feeling is that Unbreakable and The Village could have been two of the strongest 93-minute films of the past decade. By that point in The Village, Shyamalan has managed to change the very nature of the film we're watching. What we thought was a period horror film set in 1897 turns out to be a science-fiction fable set in the modern day. That’s quite an accomplishment. And I believe he should have stopped there.
Shyamalan needs to find the courage to release shorter films—he can and should be the master of the 90-minute high-concept thriller.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Daniel Calvisi is a professional story consultant, teacher and screenwriter and can be found at Actfourscreenplays.com.
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