M. Night Shyamalan Says ‘Lady in the Water' Is His Most Underrated Film

M. Night Shyamalan wants people to take another look at "Lady in the Water," and honestly, maybe it's time. I'm no fan of the film, which I saw nearly 20 years ago, but a rewatch might be in order?

In a new interview with TheWrap ahead of Beyond Fest's 13-film retrospective of his work at the American Cinematheque, Shyamalan was asked which of his movies deserves a proper reappraisal, and he didn't hesitate. It's the 2006 bedtime-story-turned-feature he made right after his messy breakup with Disney, the one that got savaged by critics and has been treated as a punchline ever since.

Shyamalan says it has a "wacky color and heart" to it, and that it's the closest he's ever come to fusing his two sides as a filmmaker: the family-film storyteller and the thriller guy.

This isn't the first time he's gone to bat for it. In an interview with The Atlantic, Shyamalan said he still "loves" the movie, and that what many viewers saw as chaos, he sees as a kind of "jazz." He's also called the $70M film "brilliant and misunderstood." Back in 2006, he even cooperated with journalist Michael Bamberger on an entire book about its making, "The Man Who Heard Voices: How I Risked My Career on a Fairly Tale.”

I remember walking out of "Lady in the Water" in a state of total bewilderment, and I was hardly alone in that. Critics destroyed it, and for good reason. It was a puzzling piece of claptrap, full of pomposity, condescension and false profundity. It also infamously featured a character who, as a "scientific experiment," worked out only one side of his body, leaving one arm and leg vastly more muscular than the others, for no apparent reason. The big exception was Cahiers du Cinéma, which has championed Shyamalan for years and loved the film so much it put it on its top 10 list that year. At the time, that seemed baffling to me.

Whatever you think of it, "Lady in the Water" is one of the most personal and formally strange studio movies of its era, a fairy tale starring Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard in which Shyamalan cast himself as a writer destined to change the world and killed off a snobby film critic. That kind of swing got him crucified in 2006.

Shyamalan, who took a critical and commercial shellacking from 2006 to 2013 with "Lady in the Water," "The Happening," "The Last Airbender" and "After Earth," has since found his footing with a self-financed run of "The Visit," "Split," "Old," "Knock at the Cabin" and "Trap," which might be the most fascinating era of his career.

Next up is "Remain," his 18th feature, co-written with Nicholas Sparks and starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a man in an isolated Cape Cod home dealing with a woman who may or may not be real. Warner Bros. opens it in February.