The Village

Disclaimer: This post is about the new movie by M. Night Shymalan, but of course he has some twists and turns in it and I don't want to ruin it for people who haven't seen it yet, so I'll try to err on the side of vagueness, but I apologize if you learn more plot than you wanted to.

The movie is about people who are isolated from the larger world, and have isolated themselves because of terrible crimes done to their loved ones. There are these terrible beings that stalk them, and they teach their children to protect themselves by carefully managing the use of color.

One thing that particularly stands out for me in this movie is how hard it is to face and live through our sorrows instead of running away from them. That healing requires feeling pain sometimes, and that the people of the village create more pain for themselves in the process of trying to run away from it.

I've also been thinking lately about postmodernism and how certainty, logic and objectivity are falling out of fashion, in a way, and for me this movie is an example of that. To be honest, there are plot holes that you could drive a truck through, but I still really liked the movie, which is not usually the case for me: I'm generally hung up on the niggling details. I think the reason for this is that the whole thing was a total experience--I was caught up in the atmosphere. And finally, those things didn't matter to me because the movie didn't really depend on the plot, in a certain way--the metaphors speak on a deeper level than the basic facts of the case. You don't expect poetry to have logical consistency.