Lady in the Water

Paul Giammati
Bryce Dallas Howard
Jeffrey Wright
Sarita Choudhury
Freddy Rodriguez
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan

Plot: An apartment superintendent (Giammati) finds a young woman in his pool and learns that she is a nymph from an old childhood story trying to make it back to her world. He has to organize the rest of the complex to save her from a group of monsters trying keep her from going back home.

Review: M. Night Shyamalan’s greatest talent as a writer/director is to pull an extraordinary tale out of the life of average individuals. Lady in the Water is the perfect example of his ability to merge the mundane and the extraordinary and keep audiences riveted. This film is basically a children’s bedtime story told to adults and I couldn’t help but get sucked in. His use of a single shot that moves into a slow crawl across the room added tension to scenes that under any normal director probably would have been dull. While the story does move along at a pretty slow pace, the attention to detail and pacing completely sold me by the end of the film. Much more akin to his film Unbreakable than his bigger hits The Sixth Sense and Signs, he builds the story and lets the twists and turns blend with the background, making the entire tale more important than the sum of its parts. M. Night Shyamalan recognizes that we are adults and while we aren’t afraid of the monster under the bed anymore, reality and fantasy can be mixed together to give us the same innocent wonder we experienced as a kid. I really cannot recommend this film more to anyone who wants to enjoy a nice fairy tale reminiscent of the stories we would hear from our parents before we were tucked in at night, but practical enough to satisfy our adult side.
 

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