Most filmmakers, when writing a script for a movie, struggle to think of one story which to base a film around. M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs) doesn’t have this problem. His problem is that he thinks up too many plot lines, then, instead of picking the best and refining it, he shoves them all into one movie without really trying to improve on any of them.

Set in what appears to be a secluded, seventeenth century village, the movie focuses on an idyllic community made up of people who have travelled from somewhere unspecified to begin a new and sheltered life, protected by the surrounding woods. However, these woods are not so much a protection as a danger, for within them lurks creatures referred to only as ‘Those We Don’t Speak Of’ (Harry Potter fans, don’t laugh, I know it sounds like Lord Voldemort’s bastard offspring). Funnily enough, ‘Those We Don’t Speak Of’ are referred to in just about every other line. Less ‘Those We Don’t Speak Of’ and more ‘Those We Just Can’t Stop Talking About’.
The Elders in the village, including Alice Hunt (Sigourney Weaver), August Nicholson (Brendan Gleeson) and Edward Walker (William Hurt), are those who first travelled to and set up the society. They have built an uneasy truce with the creatures; if no one in the village goes into the woods, none of the creatures come into the village.
However, when mysterious, enigmatic blacksmith Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks permission to cross into the woods to visit the towns for medicines, things start to go wrong. Half-skinned animals start appearing all over the village, red paint marks are found on the doors (‘Those We Don’t Speak Of’ sound more and more like the little toerags that hang round the end of my road with spray-cans!) and then, suddenly, the creatures appear in the village…

Colour plays an interesting part in the movie. Red is ‘the bad colour’; it attracts and angers the creatures, who in fact walk around wearing red hooded cloaks (if you ask me, Shyamalan has been watching a little too much of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now). Yellow is the good colour, it pacifies them, and so yellow is daubed on all the trees and Ivy and Lucius spend half the movie walking around wearing yellow counterparts of the creatures’ outfits (little quibble: these are creatures with claws, who live in the woods. How in the hell do they make themselves these utterly-chic red cloaks?!) The symbolism (red is for danger, also the colour of blood) works fairly well, but the sight of blind Ivy walking through the woods in a yellow hooded cloak reminded me just a little too much of, erm, Yellow Riding Hood.

The acting, particularly that of the younger characters, is generally good.
As blind Ivy, Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of A Beautiful Mind’s Ron) is luminescent, beautiful in an unspoilt way; feisty and intelligent and direct.
Phoenix, despite only having relatively few lines in comparison to his large amount of screen time, is also very good. He suggests simmering emotion bubbling just below the surface as well as he did in his Oscar-nominated turn in Gladiator and, despite not being conventionally good looking, he does troubled romantic hero very well. Joaquin has all but shaken off his River’s shadow and is pretty well established as a far brighter star in his own right.
Weaver, Hurt and Gleeson sleepwalk through their roles and the admirable talent that they share between them doesn’t really get chance to blossom with the stilted dialogue. They are believable, but not outstanding.
For an Oscar-winning actor, Adrian Brody, as village idiot Noah Percy, overacts shockingly badly. At the best of times, it’s hard to convincingly play someone with mental illnesses, but it has been managed (think Daniel Day Lewis’ towering turn in My Left Foot) and Brody should feel incredibly ashamed of this performance. Between this and Keira Knightley in King Arthur, I’m really dreading their joint venture in The Jacket.