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.

The Village Review (Classic Write-Up)

SPOILERS FOR THE VILLAGE AHEAD

If the life of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan were ever adapted into a cheesy documentary, the point in his career when The Village was released would be when the music would get tense and the narrator would intone "And that's when things (dramatic pause) went wrong.". Prior to the release of this movie, Shyamalan had three back-to-back-to-back critical hits and two of those films became box office phenomenon's. It seemed as if the guy could no wrong...until this 2004 feature came along and tossed the director into a decade-long artistic downturn that finally got reversed with last fall's sleeper hit The Visit.