Night moves.

'HOW come we never heard about the magic rocks before?" asks a befuddled character in The Village, M. Night Shyamalan's new film. By this point in the film, audience confusion will likely have given way to irritation. Shyamalan, who has brought us such dramatically compelling and subtly frightening films as The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), and Signs (2002), here produces an absurd film, with an incredible plot that veers unintentionally from its intended genre of horror into comedy. It may not be the worst film of the year--The Day After Tomorrow remains a serious contender--but it certainly ranks as the most disappointing.

The disappointment is a consequence of the expectations aroused by Shyamalan's previous efforts. With The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan announced a new beginning in the horror genre. The gory, nihilistic bloodfest into which horror movies had sunk in the 1990s put filmmakers in a bind: The genre and its audience had increasing, and increasingly jaded, expectations for the aesthetics of evil, spurring competition to outdo previous films in the quantity and quality of the acts of maiming, raping, decapitating, and murdering victims. The greatest novelty to emerge in the late 1990s was the genre's degeneration into self-conscious parody in the Scream and Scary Movie films.

Then came Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense appeared in the same year as The Blair Witch Project; even more than Blair Witch, whose scares rested mostly on the gimmickry of a hand-held camera, Sense returned us to less overt forms of horror, predicated upon audience sympathy with the dilemmas of the characters. Shyamalan self-consciously locates himself in the tradition of Hitchcock, who once said, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." Like Hitchcock, Shyamalan appears in his own films--you can spy him as the one revealing secrets at the end of The Village. At his best, Shyamalan slowly builds the tensions and then delivers bangs, as in Cole Sear's sudden vision of ancient hangings in his modern-day Philadelphia grade school in The Sixth Sense or the appearances of the aliens in Signs.

Much more than Hitchcock, Shyamalan exhibits an abiding interest in questions of faith and divine providence. The Sixth Sense is pitched at the intersection of life and death, where souls struggle for reconciliation, for a way of putting their lives in order; Signs is about the loss and recovery of faith, about the fundamental option between chance and providence. Of course, these films are also about fear: fear of death, fear of being trapped in the evils of the past, and fear of individual and cultural catastrophe from an unexpected malevolent intervention.

The theme of fear, in this case fear of the entire, tainted modern world, is once again at the forefront in The Village, which features a late-19th-century Amish-like community that has purposely isolated itself from the rest of society. In this film, Shyamalan wants to create a mood of unseen but encroaching menace, the sort of mood captured so effectively in Peter Weir's underappreciated Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). In The Village, the menace, represented as the "ones we don't speak of," is associated with the color red, the "bad color."

A boundary demarcates village property from the woods, where the threatening creatures live, and beyond which is the civilized world. The menacing creatures, blamed for the mutilation of animals on village property, make an appearance fairly early in the film, wearing red outfits that make them look like giant rats in Little Red Riding Hood costumes. Viewers will likely already have anticipated the truth about the mysterious creatures by the time it is revealed just over midway through the film. From this moment forward, the lingering question concerns the community's motive in removing itself from the wider world.

The community's forebears, it turns out, were afflicted and infected with greed and violence. One character, played by Sigourney Weaver, keeps mementos of evil things from the past stored in a chest. She explains to her now adult son, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix), that she keeps them to fend off forgetfulness, which would in turn allow the evils to return. But there is no effective strategy to fend off the past. Escape and isolation seem futile: "You run from sorrow ... but sorrow will find you. It can smell you."

In this case what reconnects the community to the wider world is the desire to assist the sick and dying, through the aid of modern medicine. Lucius requests that he be allowed to travel through the forbidden forest to secure the medicine. Initially, the community leader, Edward Walker (William Hurt in a stilted performance), resists. But when Lucius, who is betrothed to Walker's blind daughter, Ivy, is himself in need of medicine, Ivy (in a remarkable first performance from Ron Howard's daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard) prevails upon her father to let her travel through the woods.

This is the point at which the magic-rocks question is posed, at roughly the same time that a village elder asks Walker why he would send a blind girl on such a mission. A good question, that--one of many viewers will pose about the plot of this film, questions to which Shyamalan provides only flimsy responses.

There are scenes that work in The Village: a stabbing that comes with a jolt and a number of scenes in the woods, the latter of which are reminiscent of Blair Witch. But the terror here comes mostly from the cinematography, from the way in which the stabbing is framed and the shifting back and forth in the woods between tight, claustrophobic shots of characters and sweeping shots of the swaying trees.

The story is a kind of parable about fear and evil, about the human longing to recover and protect innocence, and about the costly and futile attempt to construct a pristine and safe world. But it fails because its themes and moods are not woven into a credible plot. In his previous successes, Shyamalan's tricks capped off enticing plots and captivating character development. In The Village, he is too taken with his own cleverness, a suspicion reinforced by his own participation in the Sci Fi Channel's faux documentary, The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan. In the documentary, as in The Village, he relies entirely on his bag of tricks, from which he pulls one desultory surprise after another.

Mr. Hibbs, a contributor to National Review Online, is the author of Shows About Nothing.