A Sound of Sheer Silence

1. In 2004, M. Night Shyamalan released a movie called The Village .  Critical reception was not great, but I enjoyed it a great deal when I saw it in the theatre.  I have thought about this movie a number of times since then, and it I think it fundamentally a fable about a certain kind of attitude that we see commonly, especially in religious circles.  To explain this, I need to spoil the movie, and in particular the twist that is the key to the whole thing, so if you want to watch the movie stop reading now. At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to the 19th Century Pennsylvania village of Covington.  We are told two things--that "the towns," from which the elders of the village come, is full of wickedness, and that the forest is inhabited by monsters.  We get a scene early on where the monster stalks through the village at night while the villagers hide in their homes.  Eventually, Ivy (the blind daughter of the head of the village, played by Bryce Dallas Howard)