Lady in the Water: Critic Reviews

Lady in the Water has some interesting moments, but fails because the story is so uninspiring. It simply does not achieve the greatness that it thinks it deserves.

Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date.

M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water is one of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable.

This pretentious, humourless (except for a joke-about-a-joke centring on the film critic) movie is breathtaking in its absurdity.

Though the result is too idiosyncratic to be regarded as just one more summer-movie whiff, those who see it may feel a need to act like a pool lifeguard and blow the whistle on Shyamalan.

If the ultimate goal is entertainment, then Lady in the Water enthusiastically rises to the task.

It is possible to wrestle yourself from the movie's hokey ambitions. There is a good chunk of Lady in the Water that is simply too well made and affectingly acted to dismiss as a mere exercise in arrogance.

Shyamalan is mystically assuming that any idea or image that pops into his skull will make a shapely tale, no matter how much cock-and-bull logic he has to invent to Gorilla Glue it together.

The story is so convoluted and ultimately preposterous that you're almost embarrassed by the earnestness of the actors trying to carry it off.

Murky like the water in the pool, or like Christopher Doyle's cinematography.

In the end, Shyamalan's stumbling Lady never gives us a reason to believe.

For weeks the Web has been rich with rumors that Lady in the Water is a dog. The noble truth is that M. Night Shyamalan's new thriller isn't half bad. The awful truth is that it's not really half good, either.

M. Night Shyamalan doesn't have an ego problem. He's just a humble screenwriter and director who makes himself a star of his own movie -- as a character who is a writer, whose words will save the world from despair and destruction.

Like Splash reworked by a grandiose Sunday-school teacher.

Just when the story begs for some clean lines and a sense of direction, we get dithering and misdirection and another confused-tenants sequence.

It's hard to think of a deadlier shotgun marriage than Jacques Tourneur's poetry of absence and Spielbergian uplift, but Shyamalan has patented the combo, adding pretentious camera movements that are peculiarly his own -- even the jokes are pretty solemn.

It's a busy made-up universe -- with rules, rituals, and a deity-tree that could give the Hindu hierarchy a run for its rupee. And it's extremely silly.

Shyamalan is too gifted a filmmaker to waste his time, and ours, on such twaddle. The best thing that could be done with Lady in the Water is to deep-six it and hope that his next project doesn't occur to him over milk and cookies with the kids.

These days, movie fans have grown accustomed to being force-fed a film's reality, to having it hammered home from first loud frame to last. Lady in the Water offers more subtle submersion, a baptism of soulful quirks and daringly sweet imagination.

As with all of his other films, Lady in the Water offers plenty of grist for after-movie dinner conversations. The film is not without merit, just difficult to figure out. Maybe that's the way Shyamalan wants it.

Hollywood cannot pollute the ozone with anything more idiotic, contrived, amateurish or sub-mental than Lady in the Water.

Shyamalan has followed The Village with another disappointment -- a ponderous, self-indulgent bedtime tale.

An act of spectacular (if unwitting) self-immolation.

Lady is the height of folly, an endeavor as wrongheaded as The Postman, as foolish as any 'vanity' project of the past 20 years.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is one nutty movie.