Lady in the Water Movie Review

Don’t let the trailers fool you. The promotional clips tease a horror story – or at least a suspenseful thriller – when in fact there’s no horror and very few thrills in Lady in the Water. Lacking M Night Shyamalan’s signature twist, Lady in the Water barely manages to tread water as the writer/director has packed his convoluted fairy tale with arbitrary rules, one-dimensional characters, and laughable dialogue.

Paul Giamatti, who once again proves he’s good even when the material isn’t, stars as apartment manager Cleveland Heep – a melancholy, quiet fellow who seems good-hearted enough. Cleveland keeps hearing someone splashing around in the pool late at night when it’s off-limits to his tenants. It turns out the late-night swimmer is a narf (played by Bryce Dallas Howard), a mythical sea creature in need of Cleveland’s help.

Story, the sea nymph, must meet one particular person before she’s allowed to return to her underwater home. Standing in her way are wolf-like creatures (the CGI is horrible) called scrunts who apparently love the taste of fish. Scrunts in turn are hunted by Big Foot-looking creatures called tartutics. There’s also a giant eagle thing involved in Story’s story, but unfortunately no lions or tigers or bears. Oh my.

Cleveland can’t protect Story by himself and enlists an eclectic group of tenants to assist Story in returning to the world beneath the apartment’s swimming pool. While gathering the group together, not one single tenant questions his fish tale. The supposedly normal adults (there’s no proof any are on hallucinogenic drugs) immediately accept the fact a narf has beached herself in their midst. The group, made up of chain smokers, a crossword puzzle fanatic and other supposedly interesting characters, must decipher clues and devise an elaborate plan to send Story back to the Blue World.

Shyamalan spells out the entire story during an animated sequence in the film’s opening credits. At that point you’re still left believing there’s got to be more, but don’t get your hopes up or you'll be left disappointed. Pay attention to the little story unveiled in the first few minutes of the film and it’ll save you the bother of sitting through the remaining 105 minutes.

Unless you’re an M Night Shyamalan fanatic aching to see the writer/director play one of the film’s main characters, there’s no reason to endure Lady in the Water. That’s right – Shyamalan has cast himself in one of the central roles of the film as a writer who’s told a couple of times during the movie that his unpublished novel will change the course of history. Filmmaker Shyamalan actually wrote a role for himself in which another character praises his writing ability and tells him he’ll become one of the most important authors of all time. Take a moment to let that sink in. Analyzing that juicy bit of egocentricity is more interesting than the film itself. It’s impossible to watch him in the film and not think to yourself, “That’s M Night Shyamalan.” Never does he disappear into the character so why in the world did he choose to plop himself so prominently in front of the camera? Just about anyone with a Screen Actors Guild card could have done a better job emoting.

Had Lady in the Water not been an M Night Shyamalan production starring Paul Giamatti I may have very well given up halfway through. But, silly me, I held out hope thinking somehow Shyamalan would pull out the stops and wow me in the final reel. It didn’t happen. A major disappointment, Lady in the Water is a yawn-inducing bedtime story that should have remained a Shyamalan family secret.

Grade: D

Lady in the Water was directed by M Night Shyamalan and is rated PG-13 for some frightening sequences.