The idea of a suburban landscape inhabited by mythical creatures, where magic worlds of meaning can open up within a domesticated habitat of cement hardscape, swimming pools and turf grass, is a delicious one. It's been done in the past, and well: "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Poltergeist" come to mind as marvelous Spielbergian examples. But Shyamalan doesn't approach the mystery and wonder of his influences.

"Lady in the Water" begins with a terrific shot, of Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) slaying dragons -- or bugs -- underneath a kitchen sink. (Plumbing -- universal symbol for the return of the repressed!) Mr. Heep is the beleaguered, stuttering superintendent of an apartment building outside Philadelphia, conveniently named The Cove, that looks like a concrete-and-glass tower on the outside, but inside harbors the decorative pizzazz of the Madonna Inn. Each apartment has an extravagant theme to match the stereotypical traits and ethnicities of its tenant(s): There's the Exotic Oriental Room, the Tacky Jewish '60s Room (with soundtrack by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and probably clear plastic covers on the upholstery), the Philosophical Rock 'n' Roll Stoner Pad Room, the Musty Old Library Hermit Room, the Tasteful Asian Subcontinent Room...

This is the setting for Shyamalan's soggy bedtime story. A pre-credits animated stick-figure prologue sets up the film's fairy-tale foundation, and simultaneously sucks all the air out of it. You can feel the movie deflate before it's even started. The disembodied narration and cave-like drawings all but announce: There will be no mystery, no discovery, here -- everything is going to be explained and explained and explained in the most banal, literalistic fashion. No show. Just tell.

The narrator explains that there is an ancient race of narfs, who, in drawings at least, look like wiggly Kokopellis wearing trapezoids. They live in water and are desperate to communicate warnings to Man, but Man has forgotten how to listen. They are sort of like amphibious Al Gores. Anyway, the Kokopellis -- er, narfs -- send their young ones to dwell in swimming pools because chlorinated cee-ment ponds are near where Man lives -- all the better to get their message across to chosen human receivers called vessels. But there is great danger, because terrible beasts with red eyes and grassy fur called scrunts, who can flatten themselves so as to hide in the lawn, are lurking nearby, hungry for narf meat.

And yet, when the movie's titular narf shows up, which she does almost immediately, she does not wear a trapezoid. In fact, she wears nothing at all and she looks nothing like Kokopelli, which makes us wonder what the hell we were looking at in that obviously bogus and misleading cartoon at the beginning. This narf, her name (remember this) is Story (Bryce Dallas Howard, child of Opie), and once the vessel sees her (she's not just a narf but a muse), she can return home to the Blue World by air, via the last of the giant eagles, the Great Eatlon. Ah, but the scrunts, they have other ideas, if they have ideas at all.