By the looks of Lady In The Water, writer-director M Night Shyamalan has finally gone off with the fairies. This "implausible and tedious" tale of a sea nymph (Bryce Dallas Howard) living in the swimming pool of an apartment complex made critics howl and it quickly sank at the box office. Only its star Paul Giamatti (playing the downcast caretaker) emerged unscathed.

Pooling Resources

"It's weirder than the other things I've written," Shyamalan apparently said as he handed the script to Giamatti. How's that for an understatement? A rather scattered, half-hour 'Making Of' documentary hears how the filmmaker came up with the idea while trying to get his kids to sleep (and no doubt it worked a treat). There are also brief insights into his visual style - mostly the way he lingers on a single point-of-view during intimate dialogue scenes - and the effects bods show us how the 'scrunts' of The Blue World come to life using animatronics. "I don't get it," says Giamatti. And he's surely not the only one...

Water Disaster

Shyamalan does his Jackanory bit in A Bedtime Story. He reads aloud from the children's book he has written, based on the film. Undoubtedly though, the best bit about this 5minute featurette are the illustrations by Crash McCreery. Elsewhere five minutes of deleted scenes do little to make sense of the bonkers mythology. Instead we're treated to more of the actors' expositional whispering and glazed expressions.

Giamatti flounders around in the swimming pool and struggles to wade through yet more obtuse dialogue in the gag reel. Finally, the audition tapes focus on the minor players who are called on to perform a convincing interpretation of feeling dizzy and nauseous for their spot in the limelight. Of course all they need do is read a few pages of the script and no acting is required... Skip this DVD and we can just call it water under the bridge, eh?

EXTRA FEATURES

Lady In the Water DVD is released on 15th January 2007.