Especially in the first years after a big success, film directors of a certain sort are given to acting like geniuses, but the conditions of success can serve to push them further and further away from their talent.
If a bright young director survives this malarkey and makes a second great hit, in Hollywood he is no longer a genius but a prophet. His relationship with reality is then likely to be beyond talking about, and unlike the successful novelist, say, or the smart young painter, a director (owing to his relationship with millions of dollars and a prideful notion of the masses) will often disappear in a miasma of tasteless lunacy. There have been many such messianic disasters in the history of cinema and they each have two big movies to their name, followed either by silence, rehab, cameo appearances, adverts, jail, or, if they're lucky, B-movies....
M. Night Shymalan ...has come to prove that success in the movies is never any guarantee of success. He was born in 1970... and he is already, in 2008, gathering force as a cautionary tale.... his latest movie, The Happening, is one of the most interesting movies of the year, despite being one of the worst. It offers a study in what happens to the mind of a talented moviemaker when he is caught between commercial histeria and his own engulfing ego. When books go nutty it's all just prose-- or the history of prose-- but when it happens to films people start losing their jobs and their houses....
When a writer/director gets into his messianic period, a period born of popular formulae that contain a little philosophy, then at the first opportunity he will begin to surrender the formulae and raise the philosophical. In a sense, success gives him the licence to misread his own gifts, and so we end up with a crazy film like Lady in the Water (2006).... a fantasy film about a ...superintendent of a block of flats,...who one night discovers a nymph in the complex's swimming-pool. Set in the present day, the nymph or Narf (who is called Story) is from the Blue World, and has come to earth to awaken a human being who has the potential to change life on earth. It turns out that this particular human being, in the film, is a budding artist played by M. Night Shmalayan. Narfs, it turns out, are pursued by Scrunts, 
red-eyed wolf-like creatures with grass instead of hair, who are afraid of only one thing, three monkey-like creatures called Tartutic who hide in the trees near the pool. Story, the nymph or Narf, wants to find the genius and bless him before she is taken back to her own world by a giant eagle called the Great Eatlon. But before that can happen, a film critic who lives in the apartment block has to make a cynical speech about the movies and then be eaten alive by a grassy Scrunt. When the film came out, one critic, slightly more measured than the others, wrote that Shmalayan's movie was "like someone pouring petrol over their heads and setting fire to themselves."
--Andrew O'Hagan, in a review of M. Night Shyamalan's new movie The Happening in the London Review of Books, 17 July 2008
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