The Lady in the Water: A Bedtime Story by M. Night Shyamalan

In M. Night Shyamalan’s The Lady in the Water, a nebbish, stuttering, very sad apartment superintendent named Cleveland Heep, played by Paul Giamantti, discovers a girl named Story, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, swimming after hours in the apartment pool. It turns out that Story is a kind of water nymph called a Narf.

Story is in the apartment pool for a reason. She needs to contact her human “vessel” in order to help him to fulfill his destiny. Then she has to return to her home, the “Blue World”, while avoiding being eaten by a grassy, horror of a creature called a “Scrunt.” One can never accuse M. Night Shyamalan of following standard Hollywood formula. He is not known as the new age Hitchcock for nothing.

The strength of The Lady in the Water does not lay in it’s story, which seems to be forced and filled with holes if one examines it too closely, but in the characters. Heep has to rally help from some of the many colorful residents of the apartment complex in order to help Story make it home. These include a cat lady played by Mary Beth Hurt, a puzzle aficionado played by Jeffrey Wright, a young dreamer with writers block played by M. Night Shyamalan himself, a bodybuilder who has developed only one side of his body played by Freddy RodrÃ?­guez and an acerbic film and book critic played by Bob Balaban.

My personal favorite, though, is Yong-Soon Choy, played with exuberance by Cindy Cheung. Choy is a much too modern and Americanized Chinese American student to suit her more traditional mother. They are always having the usual mother-daughter spats in Chinese while Heep looks on bemused. But it is she who relates the story of the Narf which, while is a mythology made up by M. Night Shyamalan, is supposed to be Chinese in origin.

One of the reasons that the story seems lacking is that everybody in it seem to realize that they are in a story. The trick is to find out ones part in it. This is the conceit of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Lady in the Water. It doesn’t quite work, though.

The movie, though, is well served by it’s two principles. Paul Giamantti’s Heep is a sad, lonely man haunted by tragedy, much like Mel Gibson’s character in Signs. His presence at the apartment and his job is a refuge from the tragedy that is eating him alive. And, of course, Bryce Howard is hauntingly other worldly with her pallid skin, bright red bangs, and a demure innocence that is both beguiling and slightly erotic.

The Lady in the Water is subtitled “a bedtime story”, which M. Night Shyamalan used to tell to his daughters. Some parts of The Lady in the Water may be overly scary for younger children and others might do over their heads. There is even a slight political subtext, highlighted by barely heard news of wars and rumors of wars heard on various televisions, but it is not hit upon too hard and not obnoxiously at all.

The Lady in the Water is not M. Night Shyamalan’s best work. That remains The Sixth Sense. There is now “OMIGOD!” moment in which an incredible twist is suddenly revealed, as in M. Night Shyamalan’s previous films. But The Lady in the Water remains a pleasant, if imperfect way to pass a couple of hours in the dark.