If you are not into fairy tales, a warning.  If you find you cannot suspend your disbelief in a world of water sprites, called Narfs, and wolfish monsters, called Scrunts, who pursue Narfs who come into the land world to help humans be better, then you might find it impossible to accept this ‘bedtime tale’ of the lady in the water.

On the other hand, we live in a Tolkein-Lewis world, so why not accept an invitation to believe?  This fairy tale shows M Night Shyamalan’s mixed cultural background: Hindu with Catholic education.  His tale is oriental.  He links it to Korean storytelling, so it is a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar.  He also peoples his plot with Americans, black, white and Hispanic, Jewish, Korean and Indian.

Shyamalan has been in critics’ guns ever since he won plaudits for The Sixth Sense.  Nothing he has done since, they say, has been any good: too pretentious, too twee…  Be that as it may, he still spins an interesting yarn and sometimes punctuates what might be too po-faced by some offhand putdowns and some jokes.  The best in this one is worth seeing as Bob Balaban as an arrogant film critic finds himself trapped in a corridor with a scrunt and gives an analysis of how this works in horror films.  Shyamalan is serious but can laugh at himself too.  However, he does give himself the key role as the author whose book will contain wisdom that will change the world – but who will be martyred for his beliefs.  (The latter seems to be being fulfilled by the critics’ hostile reaction.)

Bryce Dallas Howard is the ethereal sprite but the focus is on a very sympathetic Paul Giamatti as an apartment super who rescues the sprite and enlists all the multinational folk in the building to find their true selves and perform a ritual to save the sprite.  The Korean myth demands an Interpreter, a Guardian and a Healer as well as a Guild to help the narf return.  They group at first misinterpret their roles but finally accept who they are and their gifts and the superintendent (who has a tragic background) can come to terms with his grief. This might be too much for a severe rational audience.

Well, that may sound too much of a sweet thing but, for the willing, allowing for a couple of banal bits with Shyamalan attempting to link the mystical with the everyday mundane (the boy Interpreter reading the breakfast serial packets is definitely a bit much), it works nicely enough, intended as it is to be a bedtime story for Shyamalans’ children.

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