Kritiken

For all its flaws — and there are many — Lady in the Water (2006) reveals the sweep of Shyamalan's empathy as a storyteller... Giamatti plays it all perfectly; it's one of the most touching performances he's ever given. Lady in the Water, even more so than The Village, falls apart if you try to watch it as a simple thriller or dark fantasy. But it's unusually moving if you get on its emotional wavelength and experience it as a drama about the need to move on.

Is Lady in the Water a good film? Probably not. If it were, most of the discourse surrounding it wouldn't exist. Though for lovers and collectors of oddities and cinematic curios, it's nearly essential viewing. Dysfunctional as it may be, I'll take it over the bulk of what I've already seen this summer.

Such self-fondling can be fascinating, and Shyamalan's narcissism is in any case less malign than Solondz's (Giamatti's presence provides a useful link to Storytelling) -- the film climaxes with Spielberg's E.T. and Close Encounters beans, refried as a spectacle of communal healing. Shyamalan spins this personal bedtime story lugubriously but earnestly, utterly unconcerned that the kids he improvised it for are rolling their eyes by the bedside.

The result is a soggy swamp of nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyahing, its only grace notes are Giamatti's fine, nuanced performance as Heep and Christopher Doyle's handsome cinematography.

[Shyamalan] can't keep his grip on this limp, moist movie — no actor could. "Lady in the Water" challenges us to believe in the power of myth. But the big challenge here is surviving the tedium of Shyamalan's meandering inventiveness. What's supposed to be fanciful storytelling is really just audience punishment. Story is the one who craves the cool safety of water. So how come we're the chumps left soaking in it?

It is possible to wrestle yourself from the movie's hokey ambitions. There is a good chunk of `` Lady in the Water" that is simply too well made and affectingly acted to dismiss as a mere exercise in arrogance. You're tempted to believe in Shyamalan's belief in storytelling, even if you don't believe in Shyamalan himself.

Some said no more surprises could come from the famously self-aggrandizing purveyor of hermetic, color-coded universes of belabored creep-out. But "Lady in the Water," though not entertaining, is undeniably the summer's most unique studio product and surely the one most excruciatingly obsessed with suspense... It's Jacques Rivette meets the Bloodhound Gang, with freelance naming by Matthew Barney.

The weakest link in Mr. Shyamalan's new film is its story, which is filled with strenuously overworked bits and locutions like scrunt (kind of like a devil dog) and the tartutic (monkeylike creatures that descend from the trees). Mr. Shyamalan has yet to realize that one Giamatti in the hand is worth two scrunts in the bush, but maybe one day, after he's recovered all those misplaced marbles, he will.

Shyamalan says "Lady in the Water" grew out of a bedtime story he made up and continued improvising and embellishing for his daughters, and that's precisely the way it feels: improvised and protracted, nonsensically and unnecessarily, just for the sake of stringing us along. And, maybe, putting us to sleep.

Among its many identities, M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water is first and foremost a gaping psychic wound, a blood-spattered, pulsating tumor ripped violently from both its creator's head and, more fascinatingly, his heart, then planted on-screen, raw and unfettered, for all to come and see. That is its beauty and its limitation.

Lady in the Water isn't awful, mind you, but it is a failure, and one that carries itself with such chest-puffing pomposity that many will take pleasure in shooting it down for sport... While the most timeless and resonant myths are relatively simple tales designed to conceal complex meanings, the one at the center of Lady in the Water is so impenetrable you need a scorecard to keep track of the players and a glossary to parse the invented terminology.

Nothing will prepare you for the rampant foolishness of Lady in the Water. The Village, his last, distended elegy for Rod Serling, is, well, Rod Serling by comparison. It's as if on some semiconscious level, Shyamalan, who I do not doubt is a serious and self-serious pop-creative original, is calling his own success into question and daring his audience to gulp down larger and spikier clusters of manure, just to see if they will. Or he's lost his mind.