Director: Ishana Night Shyamalan
Cast: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan
Have I Seen it Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: One doesn’t want to blindly impugn the work of a first time filmmaker, and there are things to recommend here. The film has an agreeable dark fairy tale vibe throughout, and much of the cinematography is pretty stellar. For the most part, when the script isn’t getting in their way, Fanning and the cast are solid.
That’s all I’ve got, unfortunately. The rest of the movie is a vague but insistent disappointment. All of the mood rather adeptly set up in the film’s first half beings to crumble away just as soon as the story feels the need to hemorrhage exposition to explain and give any degree of sense to its army of fairies*. Rules are spat at us and just as quickly ignored. Beyond that, the dialogue just gets plain dumb. “It’s a door!” one character exclaims, when a door is suddenly revealed. The creatures depicted are pointedly nothing special, made all the more derivative when the A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) played right before. These fairies jump out of the far end of the frame and rattle with the same vibe as the aliens in that series.
All of this might be tolerated if not completely forgiven when we see this as the first exploratory attempt of a new filmmaker. The inescapable problem really comes from the fact that this might only be remembered as one of the great missed opportunities in film. I won’t indulge in any sort of discourse around nepo babies, but if I had the opportunity to direct a major motion picture before I turned 30 largely because my father is one of the more iconic—if not consistent—filmmakers of the last 30 years, I would be desperate not to make a film so insistently like the films my father produces. I’m not sure if the studio needed something that fit in with the Shyamalan brand, or if it never occurred to the filmmaker that something else would not only be needed, but appreciated. But more creative heads should have prevailed.
*Spoiler alert? Maybe.