Unfortunately, I cannot. The already poor performance of Lady in the Water this past weekend is going to worsen quickly, and it will sell virtually no DVDs. I’m serious. The only reason it will eventually make back its fifty-five million dollar budget is because M. Night Shymalan’s name has enough cache worldwide to pull in his old fans for a single viewing. (Virtually no one will see this movie a second time.)

It’s not that I think Shymalan failed at what he set out to accomplish. I’m one of those idealists willing to accept on faith that many filmmakers—like most canonical novelists—usually realize their artistic vision. Where some enjoy pointing to apparent “errors,” I’m likely to see a veiled purpose requiring greater consideration and patience from the observer.

A case in point: towards movie’s end a bloodthirsty, wolf-like creature stuck in an apartment building breaks down a door to get outside and . . . the door swings inwards instead of outwards. Where some critics will see a mistake, I see the conscious insertion of one among many irrational elements crowded into this flick. The movie’s menagerie of oddities includes a guy obsessed with muscling up just one half of his body (the right side), an anti-social woman only willing to share her knowledge about an ancient fantasy in small pieces, and a couple gaggles of adult friends who spend their days behaving like children.

The problem here is that all this strangeness is going to be too much for the masses (which, this time around, includes me).

This oddball just won’t roll in a straight line. Shymalan appears bent on creating a modern bedtime story that reproduces for an adult audience the weirdness, violence, and unpredictability that characterize many of the world’s classic fables. Despite its identifiable trajectory, the plot drags us from one odd situation to the next, filling up the interstices with strange character moments and still stranger dialogue. There’s something surreal about the whole thing, like we’re walking through one of Salvador Dali’s pieces where clocks drip or elephants morph into swans, but without even the thematic continuity that binds together such paintings.

If I had to praise some element of the movie (and I do—this is Shymalan, after all), I’d say that he actually succeeds in creating something truly new and different (the movie’s strawman movie critic has concluded there’s nothing original coming out of cinema anymore). And (maybe) the movie’s strangeness provides a helpful metaphor for what it might be like for those encountering the Christian faith—with its symbolic cannibalism, paradoxical moral lessons, and irrational grace—for the first time.