Lady in the Water (2006)

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Cindy Cheung, M. Night Shyamalan, Sarita Choudhury, Jeffrey Wright, Bill Irwin, Jared Harris, Mary Beth Hurt, Freddy Rodriguez, June Kyoto Lu, Tovah Feldshuh. [PG-13]

Giamatti’s apartment super discovers water nymph Howard swimming in the pool late one night; she has come from the Blue World to “inspire” a writer (excuse me, “The Writer”) to create a piece of literature that will save mankind, but she’s also threatened by a wolflike creature that hides in the grass and means her harm. Shyamalan’s real-world-set fantasy was allegedly cooked up as a bedtime story for his kids that he would keep expanding on as he went, and it sure feels like a bunch of nonsense that an idea-strapped fellow would invent on the spot; storytelling has rarely been so exasperating, so laughable, so wrong-headed, and so unimaginable before. The actual details of the lore (narfs and scrunts and so on) aren’t the problem—it’s pretty standard fairy tale stuff, poorly integrated into contemporary reality. The problem is how the story is told, how bits of information are relayed or unearthed, how all the kitschy eccentrics in the building react to the developments, how unendurably self-serious it is, and how it all gets resolved (the “oh, come on” factor is through the roof). As if all of that wasn’t bad enough—and it is spectacularly bad—Shyamalan also has the audacity to cast himself as the messianic “Writer,” bound for the immortality of martyrdom, while the only person in the whole apartment complex to not go along with all the hogwash is Balaban’s cynical and self-referential film critic (doomed to a grisly demise, of course). If the writer/director’s career can survive this debacle…and The Happening…and The Last Airbender…and After Earth…and—er, anyway, if his career can survive all that, he’s proven impervious to critical opinion, and should turn his attention back to just trying to make decent movies again. David Ogden Stiers provides the opening narration.

7/100