Lady in the Water

As an immediate experience M. Night Shyamalan’s “bedtime story” Lady in the Water fails to deliver. Shyamalan asks for a bit too much cinematic innocence on the part of his audience. I’m still chewing on what it was ultimately about—not the movie itself, which violates too much of its own internal logic to be taken seriously as being well thought out—but the director’s intent. Granted, he did deliver a couple of decent jolts, but nothing nearing the moment of goose-pimply frisson I’ve found in each of his previous outings. Shyamalan’s biggest hurdle here is providing a subtext railing against analyzing a film (or in this case “The Story”), which is only arrived at by analyzing the damned film. My head hurts.