Opiniões dos críticos

The title that changed my mind on Shyamalan, oddly enough, was The Village (2004), the one that caused much of his audience to turn on him. But the film was too weird, too beautiful, too personal to dismiss... The film's predictability as a thriller allows you to see beyond its genre trappings: It works a lot better if you see it as a wrenching drama about the extremes to which people are driven by unimaginable loss.

It's easy to sneer at someone who so steadfastly believes in the power of human connection, so much so that the most romantic and cinematic moment in the whole film is when one character takes another by the hand... Between the shattering emotional core, cinematographer Roger Deakins doing the best work he had ever done, and James Newton Howard's magnificently evocative score, every time I watch The Village, I never want to leave.

The movie's plot twist, normally the big draw of Shyamalan's work, felt anticlimactic [to most of its audience]. Eight years on, The Village now looks to me like Shyamalan's best film, in part because its twist is so essential to its overall meaning... [The twist] doesn't simply expand upon the story, but recasts it as allegory. The film's adult characters have responded to tragedy by clinging to an idealized version of the past.