The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004)

With Shyamalan seemingly hell-bent on exhausting his goodwill credit with the likes of The Last Airbender, it's worth remembering how he got any kudos in the first place.
The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable married a patient build-up of character and developments with luminous photography, but it was the ingenious twist ending that proved the clincher. The Village starts with the same ingredients, with a cast of stalwarts and no less than Roger Deakins behind the camera, and also an intriguing change of setting to a turn-of-last-century Quakerish village seemingly isolated from the rest of the world by woods populated by 'those we don't speak of'.
For a moment, when the bogeymen first appear on screen, the worry arises that Shyamalan may be going down a disappointingly conventional siege horror route but...but you know that a freight train of a twist is on its way. The certainty of this is both the film's saving grace, in that it keeps you watching, and ball-and-chain, since it requires a degree of skill in camouflage that the script simply doesn't manage this time. The illogicalities pile up badly towards the finale.

5/10