M. Night Shyamalan's Scary Future

By RICHARD CORLISS

They seem a typical lot, the residents of the apartment complex that's the setting for M. Night Shyamalan's new film, Lady in the Water. Yet many of them are searching for a mission. One, Vick (played by Shyamalan), is composing a tome he calls The Cookbook, which is full of his thoughts on how to make a better world. But Vick's not at all sure about his endeavor. He wonders if he has been wasting his time.

Vick is not, by a long stretch, Night (as everyone calls Shyamalan). The filmmaker not only has a vision, he already knows it sells. His big-break movie, The Sixth Sense, which gave us the phrase "I see dead people" in 1999, took in $672 million at the worldwide box office; Signs in 2002, an additional $408 million. Even his "flops," Unbreakable and The Village, grossed in the $250 million range. Shyamalan (pronounced Shah-ma-lahn) is well aware of the power of those numbers. "Except for Pixar, I have made the four most successful original movies in a row of all time," he says--not as a boast but to explain Hollywood math. His films are relatively inexpensive to shoot, costing about $65 million to $68 million. "If you're not betting on me," he says, "then nobody should get money. I've made profit a mathematical certainty. I'm the safest bet you got."

In some circles, though, there's a feeling, as creepy as the tingle his films give his audience, that Shyamalan's exalted position is a little precarious. First, there's the suspicion that, as a storyteller, Shyamalan might be a one-trick pony. O.K., it's a great trick: the notion of dread congealing around some ordinary man, capped by a switcheroo that casts all that preceded it in a darker light. But the surprise ending can restrict an artist. (Ask O. Henry; ask Rod Serling.) If viewers of each new Shyamalan film get a twist, it feels predictable. If they don't, they feel cheated.

Alienating his core audience is one thing; alienating a studio is another. In a move that caused no small commotion in the industry, Shyamalan and Disney, which had sponsored his four big films, parted ways over his latest movie. According to an adoring new book, Michael Bamberger's The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale (Gotham Books), the Mouse House offered him $60 million to make the film, but the director felt the studio didn't give the script enough love. (His assistant flew to Los Angeles to deliver the script to Disney execs on a Sunday at their homes, and when one of the executives wasn't home at the appointed time--she had taken her son to a birthday party--Shyamalan felt dismissed.)

"The relationship with Disney is definitely parent-child, in all the best ways and in some of the difficult ways," Shyamalan, 35, says. "The things that made me conventional were celebrated, and the things that made me unconventional were not celebrated. I felt a large part of me was unconventional, and I didn't want that part to die." So Shyamalan went to Warner Bros., which is releasing Lady and which, he says, "has already offered to make the next movie, sight unseen." Disney, in a statement, said it wishes the director "the best of luck with Lady and all future endeavors."

In many ways, Shyamalan expects not to be liked. Making movies near his home in the Philadelphia suburbs, the India-born auteur is essentially a foreign filmmaker in his own country. When Bamberger's book got a derisive review in the New York Times, the director figured the animosity was aimed at him. "You get in my corner," he says, "you're going to get pummeled." The book, although hagiographic, portrays Shyamalan as defensive and obsessed with his critics. (In Lady, one of the characters is a bored, bitter movie reviewer.) "It's human nature," Shyamalan says. "Twenty-six people love the movie, and the 27th person hates it, and the only thing you can think about is the 27th person."

But the 26 are not crazy. Shyamalan makes scary movies that are really art films, adult films. His heroes carry despair like a tumor. They are, figuratively or literally, the walking dead, cut off from their wives and children by some awful event. Then they realize their selfless, daredevil mission. Heroism is the cure for emotional entropy.

There's also Shyamalan's camera style to savor. His film frame is a box like Pandora's, and he's a master at knowing how far to open it, and when. His control of film artifice rivals that of Alfred Hitchcock, who also had to endure criticism of being a slave to formula.

With Lady, Shyamalan has twisted his "twist" formula. Instead of devising one narrative rule to be broken at the end, he tells a story that makes up its rules as it goes along. The people onscreen have to figure them out--and those in the audience do too.

The tale begins when the superintendent, a sad sack named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), notices strange nocturnal activity in the pool: a woman surfaces, then submerges. The Lady (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a "narf," a sea nymph (named, alas, Story), and she has a task for Heep: get her home. If only he can find--among the residents--the people with the magic to help her. If only they all are not devoured by the Lady's enemy, the wolflike "scrunt" that prowls the grounds.

Lady in the Water began as a fairy tale Shyamalan told his two daughters, now 9 and 6. "There was an intoxicating freedom," he recalls, "to telling stories that were using a kind of reliance on faith. I said, I'd love to make a movie under that umbrella of feeling. So I proceeded to write, cast, crew, shoot, edit and conduct myself in that same spirit of I don't know what's coming."

It's a challenge to offer, amid the burly blockbusters of summer, a tale as soft and dewy as the poolside lawn at dawn. The self-proclaimed "safest bet" is working without a safety net. "I am fully aware of the giant risk I'm taking," he says. "Being as eccentric as my mind will let me and then hearing people's responses. This requires an incredible amount of pain. Everyone around me--98%--at some point doubted."

All filmmakers are occasionally bound to test and confound their audience. Shyamalan has earned that right. But perhaps for his young-male audience--and certainly for this critic, who's usually on Shyamalan's wavelength--Lady doesn't work. Although he detonates a few terrific frissons involving the scrunt, the stabs at comedy are lurching and arrant. The spreading of tension from one character to many dilutes the mood. The would-be rapturous Spielbergian ending is on the wussy side.

Shyamalan is prepared for bad reviews. "It could be a complete failure," he says of the film. "Or it could be a grand success with the other four. I don't know. But somehow I feel success. I feel peaceful." He takes a cue from his film. "The moral," he says, "is, When you find your voice, your life takes on grace."

Besides, he notes, "even if this movie goes down, that still makes me 80%." In other words, Lady may tank, but Night won't fall. For a Q&A with M. Night Shyamalan on his career and latest movie, visit time.com

With reporting by Reported by Barbara Kiviat/Chester County, Pa.