I’ve always enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan’s revisionist-style movies; the intricate ghost horror Sixth Sense is one of my favorite horror films of all time, and I felt Signs was a wonderfully intimate drama. Lady in the Water isn’t on the same level as either of those two, but it does have a fairly interesting premise. (And no, it’s not the M. Night Shyamalan revision of the Splash genre.)
Paul Giamatti is perfectly cast here as the dour, stuttering super at The Cove apartments, who finds a magical creature swimming in the public pool. Here is a film that is essentially a far-fetched bedtime story enacted in urban Philadelphia, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There are moments when you feel that Shyamalan was making the story up as he went along, because honestly, the rules that are set out for our principal characters are confusing, and end up being switched around at critical moments.
One of the things I’ve always liked about Shyamalan’s films is the tightness of the vision, which is often the case when a single person is writing, producing and directing. Sometimes though, this same level of control can result in a purely self-indulgent kind of production; Lady in the Water, in my opinion, is a bedtime story that didn’t really need to be told.