Lady In The Water

Scholars of the Book of Shyamalan (that's BS for short) will doubtless lap up this latest mythology to spring from his pen. There are narfs and scrunts, vessels, a guild and countless other BS terms which don't so much require you to suspend your disbelief as to shut it in a little-used room of the house and put a padlock on the door.

If you've got your disbelief under lock and key, then you might garner a degree of enjoyment from this rather damp squib of a story, care of some absolutely top drawer acting from Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard and a raft of gorgeous cinematography and intelligent direction (the one skill Shyamalan possesses in spades).

Giamatti is a stuttering caretaker/odd-job man for a block of flats inhabited by a collection of oddballs. One night he finds a woman in his pool who turns out to be a water nymph who wants to get home and, to help her do this, he must enlist the help of an unspecified group of people.

This could have made a decent movie but the mythology comes so thick and fast that it mixes to a slurry as you watch, though Howard does her best with the Confuscianisms she is scripted with.

Back in the book of BS, we find it is written that Shyamalan will cast himself as a son-of-God-like figure, whose words will inspire "a boy in the Mid-West" to lead a country. Not that he likes to build his part at all.

By the end it's easy to see why the good folk at Disney - for whom he was originally going to make the movie - told him to cut the BS. Shame he chose simply to transport it to Warner instead. With such an eye for direction and a knack for getting terrific performances from his cast, it is only to be hoped that MNS adapts someone else's words next time.