Director-writer M. Night Shyamalan frightened and intrigued us in The Sixth Sense. He frightened and intrigued us in Signs. He frightened and intrigued us -- well, a dwindling percentage of us anyway -- in The Village, which, in hindsight, seems more bizarre than frightening.
In Lady in the Water he again frightens us more than once in the creepy, shadowy, nighttime doings that center on a swimming pool at an apartment complex outside Philadelphia.
And yet for all the unexpectedly startling jump-at-you moments in Lady in the Water, in the end Shyamalan's film merely seems all wet.
It's allegedly based on an ancient Asian bedtime story that involves a water nymph, red-eyed wolf-like creatures and three omniscient monkeys in a tree, but it's inexplicably played out in contemporary Pennsylvania (save for the fact that Shyamalan lives nearby). By the time this strange mishmash is over you might wind up scratching your head and saying, "What was the point?" For all its spooky buildup, Lady in the Water never reaches that "Aha!" moment of THE BIG PAYOFF. It fizzles where it should fizz.
Shyamalan always seems to be reaching, reaching, reaching in his films toward THE BIG PAYOFF moment where he pulls the rug out from under the audience with some huge surprise twist. But this time he winds up with a bit of wispiness that just floats off into the ether.
Paul Giamatti, saddled with the unlikely name of Cleveland Heep, plays the downhearted superintendent of that apartment complex whose residents seem one step beyond overwritten, or maybe the loony bin. These include a dismissive Korean woman and her flirtatious daughter, who pretends to study when she's really out clubbing; a bodybuilder who has developed only one side of his body as an experiment; a self-satisfied film/book critic with a superiority complex; a man who spends his days working crossword puzzles with his young son; a hermit-like middle-aged man who spends his days watching documentaries on TV; four guys who sit around arguing about nonsense and smoking cigarettes.
Heep himself is saddened by a past tragedy that is brought up late in the plot and doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with the rest of it. At least it's a reason for why he always looks so morose and lonely. Cleveland's outlook changes the night he discovers a pale young woman, who calls herself Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), living in the passageways beneath the building's swimming pool. She surfaces at night to steal trinkets left behind by daytime swimmers.
When she steals out of the pool at night, she's watched from the shrubbery by a growling, red-eyed creature that looks a few evolutionary steps beyond wolf.
Cleveland is mystified by the young woman, but not enough to call the white-coat guys. After all, in her rare lines of dialogue she seems able to peer into the future and forecast coming events. So he takes her in and begins searching around for some reason for her being in the swimming pool, since she seems reluctant to talk.
Eventually, with the help of the flirtatious gal and her reluctant-to-divulge-much Korean mother, Cleveland latches onto the theory that the lady in the water is a "narf," a nymph-like being who is the subject of an ancient Asian tale. She's being stalked by the vicious wolf-like monsters who want to stop her from making the dangerous journey back to her world, where she will be revered as the nymphiest nymph of all . . . or something.
Why she's in Philadelphia and how she got there is all rather vague. The important thing is to get her back to her world so she can work her magic and somehow help mankind. Howard plays all this with a wide-eyed stare and not much dialogue, so good luck in making sense of it, although she does allow that Cleveland has some important purpose in life.
Cleveland figures, from the pieces of story the Korean woman deigns to spit at him from time to time, that a certain special group of humans are the only ones who can rescue the lady in the water. Soon he comes to believe that they are among the residents of his apartment complex. These include, perhaps, a writer with writer's block (played by an unbilled Shyamalan himself) who is working on a cookbook, and the man's more outgoing sister (Sarita Choudhury.)
With a plot so whimsical and yet so pointless, is it any wonder that Disney, which has bankrolled all of Shyamalan's other big films, decided to pass on Lady in the Water?
Shyamalan, to his credit, does infuse the film with an eerie air of mystery and trepidation, occasionally giving the audience a breather with the comic relief of the funny mother-daughter routine batted back and forth beautifully by June Kyoko Lu and Cindy Cheung respectively. And he keeps us curious as he seems to be building toward one of his trademark big finishes -- "I see dead people." But Shyamalan's fertile mind hits a brick wall, and so does his film, a bushel of hocus-pocus baloney. In the end, one may simply feel hoodwinked.
mjanuson@projo.com / (401) 277-7276
**
Lady in the Water
Starring: Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Wright, Sarita Choudhury, M. Night Shyamalan, Connie Cheung, June Kyoko Lu.
Rated: PG-13, contains violence, scary moments.
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