Lady in the Water

Another out-of-the-world flick that attempts to bring a bedtime story to life. Lady in the Water infuses fantasy into reality about Story, a water nymph, living underwater in a pool situated in a seemingly ordinary apartment.

However, for realists out there, this film may come off as senseless or idiosyncratic for the cynic in you. The facts are made up of fiction, and the movie has to constantly find itself explaining to the viewer the quirks and rules of law of the other world (where water nymphs live), like how an eagle will soar above the sky at the right moment to bring the "water nymph" back to their world. It comes to the point where the movie is almost nonsensical, as the director aims (and fails) to beef up the movie by smoking new facts up to prop the film's storyline.

The main theme aside, the film has its memorable moments. But, what stands out the most for me, even more than the main theme of this flick, is how the director aims to break the conventional with his unconventional sub-themes, which is aplenty in this supposedly horror flick sprinkled with its heart-stopping moments (even those most of them, I must say, are cheap thrills, leaving nothing to the viewers' imaginations except to scare the hell out of them).

In it, there is an intelligent character, who often amuses himself with the fact that "there is no originality left in this world" and he can supposedly predict a story's ending after reading only a few lines of the beginning. (Case in point: No one in real life walks around saying their thoughts out loud, as evidenced in films.)

In this movie, a point that Shyamalan, the director, hopes to bring across is that the world is connected. And, that no individual, no matter how seemingly unimportant in the first place, is not a part of the jigsaw puzzle that forms the world. He puts this ideology of his blended into the movie where a useless pool boy later goes on to play an important fixture.

All in all, this is one child-like film that will test the boundaries of your patience.