No, it’s not a remake of M. Night Shyamalan’s polarising 2004 thriller.
From director Michihito Fujii, The Village sends you into a fictional Japanese mountain hamlet known as Kamon, where protagonist Yu Katayama (Ryusei Yokohama) is in a tricky place. He seems unable to leave this village where he’s socially ostracised due to an incident in his family’s past. It also appears he faces an « unavoidable fate » linked to a traditional noh mask, and the trailer hints at discussions of conformity.
Netflix’s trailer doesn’t give much away, but there’s been a bit of discussion around the film, particularly around modern representations of closed, provincial communities in Japan.
« I wanted to raise the issue about the very act of relying on a community, » Fujii told Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun. « I made the work in the belief that society should be formed by sensibly independent individuals. »
