M. Night Shyamalan's Scary Future

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In many ways, Shyamalan expects not to be liked. Making movies near his home in the Philadelphia suburbs, the India-born auteur is essentially a foreign filmmaker in his own country. When Bamberger's book got a derisive review in the New York Times, the director figured the animosity was aimed at him. "You get in my corner," he says, "you're going to get pummeled." The book, although hagiographic, portrays Shyamalan as defensive and obsessed with his critics. (In Lady, one of the characters is a bored, bitter movie reviewer.) "It's human nature," Shyamalan says. "Twenty-six people love the movie, and the 27th person hates it, and the only thing you can think about is the 27th person."

But the 26 are not crazy. Shyamalan makes scary movies that are really art films, adult films. His heroes carry despair like a tumor. They are, figuratively or literally, the walking dead, cut off from their wives and children by some awful event. Then they realize their selfless, daredevil mission. Heroism is the cure for emotional entropy.

There's also Shyamalan's camera style to savor. His film frame is a box like Pandora's, and he's a master at knowing how far to open it, and when. His control of film artifice rivals that of Alfred Hitchcock, who also had to endure criticism of being a slave to formula.

With Lady, Shyamalan has twisted his "twist" formula. Instead of devising one narrative rule to be broken at the end, he tells a story that makes up its rules as it goes along. The people onscreen have to figure them out--and those in the audience do too.

The tale begins when the superintendent, a sad sack named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), notices strange nocturnal activity in the pool: a woman surfaces, then submerges. The Lady (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a "narf," a sea nymph (named, alas, Story), and she has a task for Heep: get her home. If only he can find--among the residents--the people with the magic to help her. If only they all are not devoured by the Lady's enemy, the wolflike "scrunt" that prowls the grounds.

Lady in the Water began as a fairy tale Shyamalan told his two daughters, now 9 and 6. "There was an intoxicating freedom," he recalls, "to telling stories that were using a kind of reliance on faith. I said, I'd love to make a movie under that umbrella of feeling. So I proceeded to write, cast, crew, shoot, edit and conduct myself in that same spirit of I don't know what's coming."

It's a challenge to offer, amid the burly blockbusters of summer, a tale as soft and dewy as the poolside lawn at dawn. The self-proclaimed "safest bet" is working without a safety net. "I am fully aware of the giant risk I'm taking," he says. "Being as eccentric as my mind will let me and then hearing people's responses. This requires an incredible amount of pain. Everyone around me--98%--at some point doubted."

All filmmakers are occasionally bound to test and confound their audience. Shyamalan has earned that right. But perhaps for his young-male audience--and certainly for this critic, who's usually on Shyamalan's wavelength--Lady doesn't work. Although he detonates a few terrific frissons involving the scrunt, the stabs at comedy are lurching and arrant. The spreading of tension from one character to many dilutes the mood. The would-be rapturous Spielbergian ending is on the wussy side.