Sightlines · reception

How The Village was received

2004 · M. Night Shyamalan · The Village on Sightlines

The arc

Savaged on release — Ebert's one-star review called the twist a betrayal, and audiences lured by horror marketing felt conned — it's since become the centerpiece of the Shyamalan reappraisal, with Deakins' cinematography and that score now routinely called masterful.

What’s debated

The eternal fight: is the twist a cheap rug-pull that sinks the film, or was it never a twist movie at all but a romance everyone watched wrong?

Its footprint

'Those We Don't Speak Of' and 'the bad color' entered the lexicon, and the cloaked creature image got parodied everywhere — most memorably skewered alongside the film's whole premise in pop-culture jokes about Shyamalan twists for years after.

Where it stands

A defining 'actually, it's good' film — the one Letterboxd revisionists plant their flag on when arguing Shyamalan was never bad.

Did you know? James Newton Howard's score — with violin solos by Hilary Hahn — earned the film's lone Oscar nomination, and Bryce Dallas Howard landed her breakout lead role after Shyamalan saw her in a stage production of As You Like It, reportedly without a conventional audition.