by Rachel Stibi

Created on: July 26, 2008   Last Updated: August 31, 2008

I wanted to like Lady in the Water from the beginning, having seen The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, all movies which I liked, I was ready to be challenged by M. Night Shyamalan, ready for a decent story that was engaging and maybe surprising, but alas, Lady in the Water never delivered.

An animation sequence in the beginning tells us about the blue' world under the water and how humans through their greed and fighting have blocked out the messages that this world has been trying to send us; about how they send their young to be sacrificial lambs of inspiration to the world; either to be taken away home again or hunted by something called a scrunt.

Paul Giamatti plays Cleveland Heep, not your average hero, but he knows every one in the apartment complex where the story will take place; he is the resident manager and maintenance man. The apartment complex is called The Cove and Cleveland helps all the residents in some way; in the first few scenes of the film and along the way we are introduced to a bizarre and confusing cast of characters as Cleveland goes from apartment to apartment fixing things.

One day by the complex pool Cleveland sees someone come out of the pool and jump back in, through a series of bizarre events, he hits his head, falls in the pool and out pops Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) to save him. Story is the water nymph or narf and as unusual as this story starts out, Lady in the Water gets stranger.

In order to get Story back to her world she must find the human, or vessel she is meant to inspire and then wait for a giant eagle to pick her up from the pool, all the while the scrunt is hiding camouflaged in the grass waiting to kill her. Through a series of conversations Cleveland finds out more about the legend of the narf from Young-Soon (Cindy Cheung), an Asian resident of the complex who lives with her mother.

Cleveland finds the human vessel meant to be inspired by Story and it is none other than M. Night Shyamalan himself. He plays Vick Ran a man who will change the world with his words and thus will change consciousness. This was not a believable role for him to be in, mostly because it seemed so fake and inconsistent with the way that he has written himself into his other films.

Now it is hard to go much further with this story, about Story, because the plot of Lady in the Water, to me, becomes so convoluted. It includes the whole apartment complex and a string of strange characters that we have been introduced to throughout the film. The ensemble is confusing and at times pointless; Reggie (Freddie Rodriguez) a resident that only exercises one side of his body and we never know why, Mr. Dury (Jeffery Wright) and his son Joey (Noah Gray-Cabey) are only ever seen doing crosswords and cereal box puzzles respectively, there is a totally pointless group of stoner guys that we never have names for, and the stuffy Mr. Ferber (Bob Balaban) who gets all the hate in the movie for being a film critic. Some of the characters seem made up to fill space; Shyamalan may not have had much purpose for them to begin with, therefore they all get some weird part within the story and become lost.

After all the story build up I just couldn't accept the confusion of this film, and although I have like most of the previous film of Mr. Shyamalan, I just could not deal with the inconsistencies and poorly made up plot. I found the story to be too unreal and I was never able to buy into the fantasy of this film.

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