This week we’re excited to present a conversation with M. Night Shyamalan, the subject of our current series Night at the Movies: An M. Night Shyamalan Retrospective, on his 2004 feature The Village. Featuring 2-for-1 double bills that place Shyamalan’s features alongside a film of his own choosing, the series runs through Thursday, September 4th.

View remaining screening schedule and secure tickets!

This conversation was moderated by FLC Senior Programmer Tyler WIlson.

Set in an isolated hamlet bordered by forbidding woods, The Village, M. Night Shyamalan’s 19th-century fable, follows a blind young woman who must decide whether to cross her community’s strict boundaries to save a gravely wounded man. Beneath its period artifice, The Village plays like a post-9/11 analogy refracted through the American Gothic tradition—evoking Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, and Irving alongside Bush-era politics in its portrait of invented monsters, fear-inducing color codes, and the high cost of fabricated innocence, secrecy, and self-containment. The result is a melancholic thriller whose emotional directness is matched by its symbolic precision, with every element working in concert: Roger Deakins’s painterly cinematography, James Newton Howard’s haunting score, and a wholly committed ensemble including Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, and Adrien Brody.