The soggy titular sprite is discovered one night by Cleveland, who seems only mildly surprised to find a woman with gills splashing around in the pool. He seems unfazed when she introduces herself as "Story" and explains in a gentle monotone that she is a Narf who has traveled from her underwater home to save humanity. Or something like that -- most of Story's dialogue is comprised of such enigmatic riddles that I was never quite sure of what exactly her amphibious mission entailed. Luckily, Story turns out not to be much of a talker -- mostly she just stares quietly at Cleveland and wanders aimlessly around his apartment, occasionally proffering fortune-cookie lines like "All beings have a purpose" or "Nobody truly knows themselves."
Story, it seems, is being pursued by a monstrous beast known as a Scrunt, which is spotted roaming around the edges of the apartment complex snarling and staring balefully into the windows of Cleveland's room. The Scrunt is legitimately terrifying as long as it stays in the shadows, which it almost never does. Each time we catch a glimpse of the creature, our fear is dulled by the fact that it resembles the love child of a timberwolf and a ficus. If words like "Narf" and "Scrunt" sound like fairy-tale gibberish to you, then you're beginning to get a sense of the film -- by the time we encounter the Tartuniks, I had begun to wonder if Dr. Seuss had been somehow resurrected to do an uncredited screenplay rewrite.
When Cleveland discovers that Story's predicament is far beyond his help, he enlists the aid of several of his fellow apartment dwellers. This turns out to be a poor choice on the part of the filmmakers, since the intrusion of half a dozen chatty, bewildered tenants quickly overpowers what little subtlety had initially existed in the delicate relationship between Cleveland and Story. As the rusty wheels of the plot began to turn, I found myself wondering what "Lady in the Water" might have been if the screenplay had done away with all the nonsense about the Scrunt and the salvation of the human race, and instead simply explored the relationship between Howard's pensive nymph and Giamatti's solitary schlub. But that would have been less exciting, harder to market, and might have even made for a good movie.
"Lady in the Water" is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a virtuoso of suspense who appears to have taken the day off this time around. Part of the charm of Shyamalan's previous films was the tantalizing brevity of exposition -- we never wanted to know why Haley Joel Osment could see dead people in "The Sixth Sense," or why Bruce Willis was impervious to harm in "Unbreakable," since the stories themselves were so damn spooky that any sort of cockamamie explanation would have seemed violently out of place. In this respect, "Lady in the Water" stumbles from the very moment it steps out the door -- before we even make it to the opening credits, Shyamalan treats us to a five-minute narrated sequence, illustrated with stick figures, in which we learn more than we ever wanted to know about Narfs, Scrunts, Tartutiks and the like. By the time these creatures eventually materialize onscreen, their mystique has all but evaporated.
Indeed, it's difficult to watch "Lady in the Water" and not wonder what's happened to the M. Night Shyamalan we know and love. For the latest and least of his films, the director seems to have abandoned his trademark minimalism for CGI monsters and an overcooked plot. Shyamalan's "Signs" was terrifying in small subtle strokes, and displayed a remarkably articulate use of silence; here, the near-constant score underlines the action, jabbing us in the ribs with a violin bow each time something important transpires onscreen. Then again, if the music is over-explicit, the camerawork is anything but -- the film's cinematography, by the usually-reliable Christopher Doyle, tries so hard to conjure up a sense of atmosphere from shadows and darkness that it ends up being visually impenetrable.
Ultimately "Lady in the Water" is crippled not by technical ineptitude but by a misguided sense of style. Shyamalan never seems able to find the nimble tone that he desperately requires to sell a film this silly. Enthralled with its own self-importance, his feather-light tale bends under the weight of its own pretensions. The effect is not unlike hearing a children's story told with the solemnity of Greek mythology -- intermittently engaging perhaps, but a bit too sincere for its own good.
The film's advertising campaign would have us believe that this is some sort of postmodern fairy tale, a "bedtime story," as the posters cheerfully proclaim. That may be true, but if "Lady in the Water" is intended as a bedtime story then Shyamalan's not the one to tell it. The stubbornly un-ironic tone that so defines the director's work -- suspense without a trace of camp -- crumbles beneath the mystical mumbo-jumbo of the narrative. No film does well with an excess of gravitas, especially not when the plot is about a Narf escaping a Scrunt with the help of a man named Cleveland Heep.
