LADY IN THE WATER: A Great, Underappreciated Fairy Tale

In texts about M. Night Shyamalan’s style and way of telling stories, gallons of ink have already been spilled, analyzing every sentence from his scripts back and forth. With his intricate story and the inseparable twist at the end, he revealed himself to the world with The Sixth Sense, and immediately caused a stir in the rather stale Hollywood crowd, accustomed to stories told the proper way, without intellectual fireworks or fire – in short: stale and predictable. His box office success allowed him great freedom, which he used to create quite an ironic Signs and The Village, simultaneously hiring top-tier stars from across the ocean. In short, he became a fashionable director – he used this to realize Lady in the Water. I can easily imagine the terrified producers who saw the final effect of his work. It seems he played a trick on them. Shyamalan, who sticks very close to the thriller genre, this time seemed to have strayed from the beaten path of genre cinema and created something he himself called a bedtime story.

Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) is the custodian and caretaker of one of the apartment buildings in the suburbs of Philadelphia. On a daily basis, he does what representatives of his profession usually do: changing light bulbs, fixing leaking faucets, replacing broken windows. His trouble is the constantly needing repair swimming pool. One evening, after it has been closed, he notices a figure trying to hide from him under the water. Unfortunately, during an attempt to pull the person out, he falls into the pool and loses consciousness. However, when he regains consciousness, he is in his own bed…

In fact, sticking to this rather loosely defined genre of bedtime story, one would have to admit that this story perfectly fits the rules of a tale that a grandmother might weave by the fireplace for a group of grandchildren. With one difference, however – this fairy tale is set in the realities of a modern American city, and because of this, it receives an additional twist of something that is usually called an urban legend, meaning a story passed down not so much by campfires deep in the forest, but rather on urban jungle gyms, playgrounds, and during breaks between school lessons. Apart from this, however, it has all the attributes of a bedtime story.

Here we have a protagonist hiding a secret from his past, a fairy who suddenly appears in his life to change it forever, a very dark character, and a ranger coming to the rescue. A bit of horror (which was never lacking, after all, in stories like those by the Brothers Grimm), a bit of warmth, a bit of mystery, and the prospect of a better tomorrow. On the surface, nothing original – just a fairy tale like any other. And yet, Shyamalan managed to give it a very individual touch, one that is hard to find in often characterless, craftsmanship-driven made in USA productions. The director and screenwriter in one created a modern, if we can call it that, urban myth from scratch.

The title – Lady in the Water – in a way forces us to look for its roots somewhere deep in Arthurian legends, although I have the feeling that in this case, it rather only points to a source of inspiration. Before our eyes, the director is building his legend from nothing, bringing to life such incredible characters as a nymph inhabiting the pool of an American apartment building, a wolf-like creature – a negative, whose home is the lawn surrounding the pool, and three guardians with one name descending from the trees growing on it. Whatever one may say about the quality of the story and the sensibility of bringing such characters to life, it must be admitted that M. Night Shyamalan impresses with the power of his imagination and the consistency with which he realizes his vision.

His fascination with the role of chance in a person’s life, which clearly began with Signs, modeled on John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, finds its continuation here. The group of residents of the Philadelphia block is almost a model circus of oddities: from a non-stop stoned crowd having learned dialogues about nothing, to a six-year-old speaking like Martin Luther King, and a bodybuilder who only trains one half of his body. The presence of each of them finds its logical justification, as they all have their place in the puzzle, regardless of what brought them there. Along with all this, Shyamalan is not lacking a sense of humor. Especially when, in this surreal world, he places a film critic (probably not coincidentally) from what seems like a completely different tale. Stripping him of his sense of humor and equipping him with traits that stand out starkly against the freak show being served to us, he creates a specific counterpoint, simultaneously mockingly making it clear to the viewer how important criticism is to him.

Lady in the Water is certainly not Shyamalan’s best film (for that, I consider Unbreakable), but it certainly once again confirms that its creator is still one of the most interesting American directors and certainly one endowed with the most vivid imagination and the gift of bringing it to life.