SHYAMALAN-TOBER: Lady in the Water (2006)

Turns out - this is actually a good movie…

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CONTENT WARNING: In our discussion of Joker, discussion of mental illness, representing illness in film, brutal violence, and abuse. Please don’t see that movie.

We continue Shyamalan-Tober this week with the movie that nearly tanked M. Night’s career for good. I mean, what do you make of a horror-thriller filmmaker who suddenly decides to write and direct a grown-up fairy-tale based on a bedtime story he told his kids? How do you market that? Not very well, if you’re Warner Brothers, and critics took the chance to savage Shyamalan at every turn. But here’s the catch: this is a really good movie. It’s a little bit sloppy and messy, and it’s definitely weird, but it all manages to work. It might be the delightful performances of the ensemble cast, or the imaginative bends on the fairy tale genre, but whatever it is, M. Night has this movie completely figured out. We discuss 2006’s Razzie-Award Winning and actual good movie, Lady in the Water.

Then, after a break, we do our best to discuss why you shouldn’t see Joker, and why it probably shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

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Intro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive.