film | Glub glub glub

If you locked Björk in an armoire for a couple weeks, fed her just Hershey bars and Red Bull, and then forced her at gunpoint to adapt the 1984 mermaid comedy Splash as a postmodern fairy tale under the guise of a drunk party guest who insists on slurring through the kind of inanely anecdotal prattle that's too galling to be funny, well, you might end up with something along the lines of LADY IN THE WATER, a nightmare of outlandish self-enchantment from director/writer M. Night Shyamalan, a guy who's made three movies that were varying degrees of good — for the record: Signs, Unbreakable, and The Sixth Sense — and, now, one that's painted in at least eight shades of awful.

Inspired by a bedtime fable Shyamalan verbally improvised for his young daughters, Lady in the Water contains enough maddening ridiculousness, crowded whimsy and lethargic storytelling to position the auteur as the front-runner for 2006's you-shoulda-kept-it-to-yourself award. (Last year's victor: Tom "Pimp my bride! And my beliefs! Oh, and my new movie, too!" Cruise, but I digress.) In his best work — the keen arthouse-superhero yarn Unbreakable and the invasion thriller Signs, taut and unnerving despite a faulty final act — Shyamalan marries the imaginative and the routine in uniquely enigmatic fantasias that are simultaneously epic and intimate. Lady in the Water aims for the same brew, as a schlubby apartment manager (the terrific Paul Giamatti, unfortunately saddled with hammy st-st-stutter) stumbles into a mess of supernatural intrigue upon encountering a sea nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard of Shyamalan's The Village) who lives in the building's swimming pool. OK, yeah, fine. Sounds like the beginnings of a charming little kiddie book. But in adult-skewed cinematic form, Lady in the Water is made of so many unappetizing mystery scraps that it winds up the celluloid equivalent of a Chicken McNugget.

Howard's ethereal "narf" (think: aquatic humanoid) has a mission: to locate and enlighten the struggling writer among Giamatti's tenants whose future works will lead generations of mankind to greatness, and Shyamalan casting himself in the role is an ego trip that recalls the memorably hokey "You give out hope like it was candy in your pocket!" moment from Kevin Costner's 1997 vanity project The Postman. Anyway, Howard speaks in kooky new-age pronouncements ("Do you feel an awakening?") until the script requires her to inexplicably fall mute, thus padding the running time with endless scenes in which Giamatti and his crew of quirky residents — including Shaft's Jeffrey Wright as a single-dad wordsmith, Cindy Cheung as a brassy Asian tart, and Six Feet Under's Freddy Rodríguez as a weightlifter who (grotesquely) works only the right side of his body — guess at what she wants them to do, get it wrong, and then repeat the process.

The rest of Lady in the Water veers between imitation Spielbergian wonder, interminable everyone-has-a-purpose moralizing, and ineffective scare scenes involving creature effects that the film apparently picked up at the Jumanji yard sale. (Let's see. there's a sod-covered wolf called a "scrunt" that stalks the narf, a triad of mohawked monkeys known as the "tartutic" that, in turn, stalk the scrunt, and a very special appearance by the cousin of the giant eagle from Lord of the Rings.) As if Shyamalan needs anything else on his plate, he plops a priggish movie reviewer (Bob Balaban) into the narrative to: A) self-reflexively comment on genre conventions (Shyamalan to his audience: "You probably think this is ridiculous ... but see, I know this is ridiculous!"); and B) ultimately get devoured by a scrunt, maybe as payback for the terrible notices Shyamalan received for The Village — with its asinine, look-how-clever-I-am! twist ending — two years ago. ("Who would have the arrogance to judge the intentions of another human being?" a character gasps.) Hey, bub. when it comes to bad films, everybody's a critic, so you'll need an entire army of scrunts to counter the negative word of mouth that's likely here. But totally eat me first. F