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The Village at 20 finds the bleak, daring M. Night Shyamalan thriller has aged well

  • Director’s 2004 film with a cast including Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard was original, sincere and sustained in its creepiness

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Bryce Dallas Howard in a still from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), which remains one of his very best films. Photo: Touchstone Pictures

This is the latest instalment in our ongoing From the Vault feature series, in which we reflect on culturally significant movies celebrating notable anniversaries.

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When M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village was released in 2004, it caused what would now be called a pile-on: the writer-director-producer had released three big hits in almost as many years – The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002) – and was perhaps a little too visible for his own good.
But while audiences were confused by this PG-13-rated period horror, and critics bemoaned what they saw as a predictable twist, the film itself has aged well, capturing as it does a snapshot of an anxious America unsure how to move past the trauma of September 11.

In 1890s Pennsylvania, a small settlement keeps itself shut off from the rest of the world. Nobody enters the surrounding woods for fear of creatures known as Those We Don’t Speak Of, and the isolationist life is simple, if hard to sustain.

After the death of a child, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) asks de facto leader Edward Walker (William Hurt) and the rest of the elders (including Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleason) for permission to go through the woods to the nearest town.
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