A thrillertale

Middle Earth and Philadelphia collide in Lady in the Water | Harrison Scott Key

Lady in the Water (PG-13, for a good fright or two) is one of those films you have to let work on you. The challenge is that you can't stop asking, What kind of movie is this? A Fairy-Thriller. Or maybe a Thrillertale. It's The Sixth Sense meets The Hobbit.

At the top, a narrator tells us about these beings who live in the water and seek contact with humankind. So we're primed for fantasy and myth. But then we meet the lumpy Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), an apartment super, and this doesn't look like fantasy at all. He picks up trash, kills a bug, visits his oddball tenants.

Whenever something completely weird happens in a realistic movie—like an alien lands or a ghost shows up at dinner—the audience generally needs one of two things. We either want a scientific explanation, or we want the hero to freak out and make us feel normal. So it's no surprise that an ashen young lady named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) lives under the pool drain. The surprise comes when Cleveland Heep rescues her from an awesome beast, finds out she's a kind of sea nymph called a narf, and doesn't seem to think he's going nuts. What's going on here? This is Philadelphia, not Middle Earth.