Lady In The Water Is Listless Fairy Tale Storytelling

Lady In The Water was a game-changer for M. Night Shyamalan but not in the ways he intended, good Lord no. His previous movie, The Village, may have generated a divisive response that resulted in strong but frontloaded box office but at least that one has its ardent fanbase. Lady In The Water, on the other hand, has spent its eleven years of existence under intense derision and has been widely seen as a turning point for Shyamalan from titan filmmaker to the nearly decade long stretch he'd spend in the land of awful cinema before The Visit revived him. I wish I could say I was going against the tide and found Lady In The Water enjoyable, but alas, I found it be a kind of interesting but mostly boring misfire.


There is a hotel called The Cove located in Philadelphia (M. Night Shyamalan's go-to location for his movies) where all sorts of wacky residents reside. Single-handily running this place is Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), a man with a profound stutter and a tortured past he'd rather not talk about. One night, he hears some splashing going on in the pool late at night. Suspecting the individual romping around in the pool at this ungodly hour may be the very same person responsible for clogging up the pools drains, he goes out to investigate and ends up slipping, hitting his head and falling into the pool. Looks like it's curtains for Cleveland Heep.

Except it isn't, as the titular lady in the water, Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), has saved Cleveland. Story has magical powers that she doesn't even need to command with grand hand gestures or anything like that. Just being in her presence influences the people around her. For instance, Cleveland talks without his stutter when he's near Story. How is this possible? Well, Story is a magical creature known as a Narf, a being of legend, that usually resides in the water. It turns out she's got a greater purpose to fulfill in her own world and she'll need the help of Cleveland and other certain people in the hotel to help get her back home.

Shyamalan's films up to Lady In The Water (sans his first two feature films which included a Rosie O'Donnell vehicle called Wide Awake) were predominately thrillers grounded in more mundane human drama. For Lady In The Water, he's trying to do a straight up fairy tale, the kind of storytelling Shrek had turned into easy fodder for mockery in the early 2000's. As fellow 2006 live-action fairy tale feature Pan's Labyrinth demonstrated, there's plenty of high-quality cinema to be mined from hewing close to the fairy tales of old, but Lady In The Water comes up incredibly short when compared to that Guillermo Del Toro movie and doesn't fare much better when taken on its own terms.

Here's the biggest issue with Lady In The Water; it treats its story as so sacrosanct that there's no hope for any sense of humanity, life or vibrancy to enter the story. Everything in this film is treated with a great sense of importance as characters talk about Story and her gifts in hushed reverent tones even though Bryce Dallas Howard just sits around on the couch or the shower for the majority of the runtime. Even the wacky characters in this story, like a group of four talkative chaps who clog their garbage disposal with their clothes, are executed in a muted manner since there doesn't seem to be any room for any kind of whimsy or energy in Lady In The Water. I'm not asking for this thing to embrace the wisecracking fast-paced nature of the Shrek movies, but I am curious why Shyamalan's script decides to embrace being so monotonous in its languid pacing.

The fact that there are no interesting characters to anchor the story is also a big problem with the production. Bizarrely, the slower pace doesn't allow for greater exploration of the characters, as the various supporting denizens of The Cove remain solely one-note concoctions for the entire story while Cleveland's character has a tragic backstory that's abruptly introduced in an unintentionally humorous fashion and doesn't play into the plot in a notable fashion. Real shame on that one since the always reliable Paul Giamatti gives the role his all in his performance. Truth be told, the only time things come alive in Lady In The Water is a sudden appearance by some bark-covered primates in the climax. These creatures come and go in a flash but at least they provide a brief jolt of fun in a feature film desperately low on energy, creativity or intriguing drama.

Sidenote: Bob Balaban's antoginsitic critic character is an amusingly over-the-top creation. His death scene is preceded by a meta-monologue in which he notes that he can't possibly die because the movie he's in hasn't had any prominent nudity or violence prior to this scene and that might be the only other moment in the movie that worked for me since it's at least an interesting kind of strange and has some life to it in contrast to the rest of the pervasively lethargic Lady In The Water.