M. Night Shyamalan has a reputation (deserved) for basing his movies around a significant plot twist at the end. Sometimes this works (The Sixth Sense), sometimes it doesn’t really (Unbreakable). I think it worked fairly well in this film, given that everybody was waiting for it, because it didn’t telegraph itself. I would imagine that most viewers considered it, when going through the set of possible plot twists in their minds, but I would also suppose that very few actually realized it before the last 15 minutes.

“The Village” is a little valley surrounded by forest, the dread “Covington Woods”, in which a number of refugees from “the towns” — apparently sinks of iniquity — have established a new settlement. We find the village at some undetermined time in history, though a brand new gravestone that we see right at the beginning of the film has the year 1897 on it, and the villagers’ dress would seem to support this particular period. We also don’t know where it is, though the villagers are obviously Americans (the script seems to be straight out of an old McGuffey’s Reader); and later internal evidence in the film suggests that this is somewhere in a forested region of Pennsylvania.

The villagers apparently maintain some kind of truce with some undefined sort of creatures who live in the forest; there is a boundary which neither villagers nor creatures are supposed to cross. But for some reason the creatures are now entering the village (we get a good glimpse of one of them — apparently a cross between a sasquatch, a wild boar, a wolf and a porcupine, sentient enough to wear a red cloak and hood not dissimilar to the yellow cloaks and hoods that the villagers often wear). In the village they were killing and skinning livestock and painting red marks on the village doors.

However, the main story has to do with a love triangle, at the apex of which is Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), the blind daughter of the founder of the village (William Hurt); and at the other vertices we find the adventurous but dependable Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix, who was also one of the stars of Shyamalan’s last film, Signs) and feeble-minded Noah Percy (Adrien Brody). When Lucius and Ivy agree to marry, Noah turns Paradise into Purgatory by stabbing Lucius multiple times, effectively removing Joaquin Phoenix from the second half of the film. Ivy then sets out through the creature-haunted forest to find her way to “the towns”, somehow acquire medicine that will help Joaquin there, and return — all of which she succeeds in doing, despite an attack in the forest by one of the creatures. And apparently the villagers will continue to live happily ever after, including the two newlyweds (Hoah is unaccountably dead …).

Shyamalan makes his usual cameo appearance in the film, though nowhere near as obtrusively as he did in Signs — the viewer will have to look quickly to determine that the back of a head and the vague reflection in a piece of glass belong to him. Music lovers may be forgiven for assuming that James Newton Howard, who wrote the score, appreciates the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Howard’s music is generally so unobtrusive that I haven’t noticed his name before — but he has produced scores for quite a number of films that I like, including Hidalgo and Treasure Planet). Note: traditionally, TV previews have tended to give away everything about the films they are advertising; but in this film, as with several other recent films, they go to the other extreme and mislead the potential viewer about the story line. TV notwithstanding, this is definitely not a horror film.

I don’t know whether you’ll want to (or will have time to) catch this at the movie theater. But if not, you’ll certainly want to rent it when it hits the tape/DVD market.