From his films and interviews, it's become clear that M. Night Shyamalan believes in the potential of fantastic forces outside normal reality to create new modern myths. He'd like to be the bard of these stories, and for a time he's been successful at delivering them, proving himself to be a canny filmmaker by packaging the extraordinary into involving tales of redemption. I've always called him a good storyteller, but something happened on the way to his latest, Lady in the Water. Shyamalan, usually a tight controller in revealing information, has suddenly lost all restraint.

Lady in the Water is a bedtime fairy tale, which could have been charming, but instead it feels like it's being made up as it goes along, as if we're actually listening to a little kid's father pulling nonsense after nonsense out of thin air. This may work for the children tucked away in their beds, but if the story's going to be a movie, it requires some economy. What happens here is an attempt to create an insular, working mythical machinery from nothing. It's ambitious, surely, but Shyamalan packs the foundation of his fantasy with way too much detail and too many rules.

The significant part of Shyamalan's tale is the conversion of his unbelieving protagonist to a being of faith, so, really, the supernatural forces he or she discovers along the path don't require gory detail, lest their mystery be diluted. But that's exactly what happens here, and in the most clumsy fashion. Much of the problem comes from the fact that the central intrigue of his story -- the myth itself -- has to be explained. It's like seeing a movie about "The Little Mermaid" where the prince's attendant tells us how the mermaid got to be on land but we don't get to see any of it, and then all we view is how she returns to the sea. 

Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), superintendent of the film's apartment complex setting, learns almost everything he needs to know about the appearance of Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) from Korean tenants who happen to know all about it from old stories passed down by grandma. The middle part of the movie is a tiresome series of consultations where Cleveland extracts rule after rule from a Korean mother via her daughter (Cindy Cheung), who is translating.

Those rules involve otherworldly beings with names like "scrunt," "tartutic," and "narf" (a word previously used as a nonsensical exclamation by an intelligence-challenged lab mouse in the cartoon "Pinky and the Brain" -- and nevermind that none of these words would have a Korean phonetic equivalent), creatures who apparently have to do certain things at certain times via certain interactions. Shyamalan then keeps throwing elements at us as if he's trying to prove a point -- the more ridiculous they seem, the more believably he tries to deliver them. Everything from prophecies to magical medicine to interpreting cereal boxes makes an appearance here. And, for once, Shyamalan doesn't seem to be consistent in his delivery -- a lot of this could work with tongue in cheek, and some of it does feel like it's accompanied with a wink, but the interaction between Cleveland and Story is played out so gravely that we can't quite figure out how seriously to take all of this.

Howard's fragile performance as Story and Cleveland's tragic backstory strive to create a dramatic, human grounding, but they're severly undermined by the seemingly random mythical elements, the weird, blind eagerness of the apartment tenants to play along with Story's rescue, and even an ingredient of postmodernism in the form of a book/film critic (Bob Balaban) who talks about what's happening as if they were all in a movie.

All of these elements serve to crack Shyamalan's storytelling credibility -- he's had problems with logic in the past, but even in such cases, as in The Village, his filmmaking technique stood out in an admirable way. Yet that technique fails him here too. Creative shots which may have suggested portentousness in past movies feel conscientious in this film, as if trying to manufacture gravity. Shyamalan's characters can usually be counted on to be colorful, but this time they feel forced and awkward. There's an overabundance of them, from a group of slackers to a man who silently watches TV to the guy who works out only one side of his body. The young Korean woman in particular is a dreadful caricature with her comically thick accent. Then Shyamalan casts himself in his own biggest role to date -- this tendency to put himself in his own movies has drawn much fire in the past, but, again, he's apparently making this film with a big chip on his shoulder. The movie is so overcooked that it isn't very scary or suspenseful, yet it doesn't feel magical or otherworldly either.

Lady in the Water feels exactly like what it is -- a film by someone trying to prove he can tell any story his way, and it's going to work no matter what anyone says. It comes across as extreme personal vision raging out of control, and it isn't pretty. That's too bad, because Shyamalan has a lot of the right ideas. His tales don't adhere to the rules (using a character like Balaban's critic to prove this point only exposes an insecurity). He has go-to themes about faith which must be deeply personal, and such themes are potent and can be applied to all sorts of mythology. But for the first time, his movie isn't about challenging a person's version of reality -- it's about laying out the blueprint to an unknown world and gaining its acceptance through mere exposure and sermonizing.

Shyamalan might've been onto something if Lady in the Water were, say, a satire of Scientology; instead, it's a mission for a bedtime story, a badly told fairy tale, lacking grace and trying the trust of its audience.

(Released by Warner Bros. Pictures and rated “PG-13” for some frightening sequences.)

Review also posted on www.windowtothemovies.com.