I don’t know what it is, exactly, about this movie, but I really connect with it. I have enjoyed watching Shyamalan’s other movies, definitely, but it is such a departure, at least superficially, from his other movies- even my beloved Unbreakable- that he can’t be the only reason. Perhaps it is the delicate mix of reality and fantasy. The reality is expressed with the mundane setting and muted stardom, the fantasy with a completely unfamiliar mythology: narfs, scrunts, and tartutics. Maybe it is the fact that the movie looks gorgeous: the scrunt, The Cove, the intimate close ups. Or maybe it all comes back to Shyamalan. The movie started as a bed time story for his children, and ended as a story about Story and stories. As an already good story-teller, Shyamalan uses this whole movie to reflect on what it means to tell a good story, and he uses a story (or even, a Story) to do so. Along the way, he attempts to touch on the fundamental aspects of humanity while making the reality/fantasy mix so muddled that, like the characters in the movie (they are really us anyway, don’t you think?), we want to believe.
Postscript: If you haven’t seen the movie, the Story/story distinction isn’t really fair. This should clear it up: the Lady in the Water is Story.
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