Lady in the Water (DVD)

Mild-mannered caretaker Cleveland Heep works tirelessly to keep the residents of an apartment block happy, virtually adopting them as his surrogate family. Insistent that the residents observe basic rules, he becomes increasingly irritated by a mystery resident who insists on using the communal swimming-pool after 7 p.m., in spite of safety warnings. One warm evening, he hears a splash in the water and rushes out to confront the illegal swimmer. Unable to identify the swimmer, he slips on the pool edge and falls into the water, unconscious from a blow to the head. When he awakes, he finds himself back in his apartment, a timid young girl sat opposite him waiting for him ...

Lady In The Water is a curious picture of a sort only a handful of brand-name Hollywood filmmakers could get away with. It is a self-indulgent, pompous, egotistical fable that says little to anyone who isn't M Night Shyamalan, and what it says to him is - it's alright, they're all wrong, you're amazing. The plot, which manages through some manner of voodoo or other to be at once overly simplistic and ridiculously convoluted, concerns the efforts of apartment complex supervisor / handyman Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) to assist the mystical, waif-like woman who shows up in the hotel pool of an evening. The woman, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, has, we learn, ...

I'm not sure at all what to think of this film. M. Night, whose gone from the next Hitchcock to the next Ed Wood in the matter of a couple of movies, shows no restraint in a practice on the pretentious and the ludicrous. The intro sets up for a promising bedtime story, but the rest takes itself so seriously and tries to be way more than it ever could be. M. Night then makes one of the least professional career moves of the decade by casting himself in the role of the most important writer of our time who'll change the world as we know it. On top of that, he throws in an unlike-able movie critic who basically destroys the fourth wall. At one point, the movie 'Enchanted' ...