Every M. Night Shyamalan Plot Twist Ranked From Worst To Best
8. The Village - It's In The Present Day
Plot: In a 17th-century Philadelphia village, the residents are being terrorized by some mysterious creatures.
In the third act of this underwhelming mystery drama, it's revealed that the village was actually created as a way of escaping the troubles of the modern world. The monsters are just the elders dressed up to prevent the residents from leaving.
Much like the divine intervention in Signs, this escape from modern life was a fascinating idea but it was done in the most jarringly illogical way possible.
Despite the village being quite close to a road somehow the residents never hear anything, and when the film's (blind) protagonist (Bryce Dallas Howard) emerges from the park, she is seen by at least one person yet no-one goes to investigate where she came from.
As for the backstory, it's said that village found Edward Walker (William Hurt) purchased the park as a wildlife reserve and pays the government to make it a no-fly zone, but this scenario is impossible. Nature reserves are taxpayer-funded and therefore not purchasable and no-fly zones of this nature simply wouldn't exist in the US.
Additionally, the reveal that there aren't actually any monsters completely negates the suspenseful build-up of the first two acts of the film. The interesting ideas raise it slightly above Signs' twist, but this remains an awful reveal and one of cinema's worst twists.