Judging by the charges of rank self-indulgence that M. Night Shyamalan endured for Lady in the Water, you might half-expect the movie to be 108 minutes of the famously self-satisfied director singing in the shower, brushing his teeth and taking a dump while reading the Philadelphia Inquirer. The 2006 movie, a cinematic rendering of a bedtime story Shyamalan told his children, absorbed the sort of critical lambasting usually reserved for the likes of Kevin Federline, Michael Bay and al Qaeda.

It's a pleasant surprise, then, to report that Shyamalan's follow-up to his much-maligned 2004 offering, The Village, is not awful. Far from it. In fact, the movie boasts a talented cast and some moments of genuine magic and intrigue.

"Not awful," however, does not necessarily mean "good." In its nakedly conscious stab at mythmaking, Lady in the Water alternately tastes undercooked and overstuffed -- perhaps appropriate for a motion picture that revolves around a McGuffin of a manuscript dubbed "The Cookbook."

The woman of the title isn't a lady so much as a sea nymph, otherwise known as a "narf" in the fairytale parlance dreamed up by Shyamalan. And the waterlogged universe she inhabits is a swimming pool at a dingy Philadelphia apartment complex called The Cove. But the poor narf, named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), is in dire straits. She needs the help of humans to return to her magical universe, and so Story gleans hope one night when she is discovered in the pool by The Cove's sad-sack handyman, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti).

Cleveland, who keeps to himself in a tiny cottage adjacent to the apartment building, suffers the scars of a tragic past that he keeps under wraps. Story's plight suddenly gives purpose to this lonesome man; in no time at all, he is helping protect the narf from a vicious creature known as a "scrunt," which lurks in the woods surrounding The Cove. Moreover, Cleveland sets out to deduce which of the apartments' tenants have preordained roles in Story's rescue.

Randomness does not exist is the hermetically sealed world of M. Night Shyamalan. As Cleveland learns that Story is part of a fairytale brought to life, Lady in the Water takes on the risible everything-has-a-purpose theme that turned the filmmaker's Signs into dross. Still, the neatly constructed order induces fewer eye rolls this time around, since Shyamalan can simply hide behind the kitchen-sink dynamic of fairytales. All the silliness Shyamalan tosses in about guardians, healers, a guild and the like reminds me of the Rob Lowe character in Thank You for Smoking, who notes that movies can remedy any inconsistency with "one line of dialogue: 'Thank God we invented the ... whatever device.'"

A lot of whatever devices turn up in Lady in the Water, a film that shamelessly displays the seams of its bedtime-story origins. Cleveland learns about Story's magical world, and what must be done to return the narf to her kingdom, from an elderly Asian woman (June Kyoto Lu) with an unnerving command of the mighty obscure fable. Neither the woman nor her Americanized granddaughter (Cindy Cheung) gives it a second thought that Mr. Heep, who quickly accepts Story's story, keeps popping up with hypothetical questions about the world of narfs and scrunts. Another resident reads magical messages on cereal boxes. Take that, Cap'n Crunch!

The cast tries to jumpstart things, albeit with mixed results. Howard, who was perhaps the best thing about The Village, is well-cast as the pale, ethereal sea nymph, but she is given precious little to do. Giamatti is also a gifted actor, but he isn't asked to do much more than stutter and project melancholy. Some very good character actors -- including Jeffrey Wright, Freddy Rodriguez, Mary Beth Hurt and Bill Irwin -- are wasted in one-dimensional roles as The Cove's apartment dwellers.

And then there is the director himself. Shyamalan has appeared in his films before, but Lady in the Water marks his first significant acting part. Here he portrays a struggling writer whose manuscript, "The Cookbook," might just be pretty darned important. As a filmmaker, Shyamalan is a bona fide original. As an actor, he is merely insipid.

Then again, maybe Shyamalan's casting of himself as the unappreciated, world-changing artist just fills some deeply rooted narcissistic need of his. There is undoubtedly some catharsis going on here. After all, he goes to lengths to make a villain out of The Cove's newest tenant, an uptight and thoroughly unlikable film critic named Harry Farber (Bob Balaban).

Despite a visual look that occasionally confuses mysterious with the color of a dirty aquarium, Lady in the Water is otherwise nicely presented in anamorphic widescreen 1.85:1.

A fairly immersive Dolby Digital 5.1 EX is available in English, Spanish and French. Subtitles are also available in these languages. The audio suffers from a noticeable inconsistency of volume -- characters tend to mumble in hopes of conjuring up atmospherics – that appears to be endemic to the film itself.

The chief extra worth seeing is a six-part documentary, Reflections of Lady in the Water (34:45), a comprehensive -- if overly adulatory – look at the conception, casting and shooting of the film. There is not a whisper about the film's tense backstory, which involved Shyamalan's well-publicized and acrimonious split from Disney.

The remainder of the supplemental material is largely filler. Lady in the Water: A Bedtime Story is essentially a five-minute advertisement for Shyamalan's children's book of Lady in the Water. Auditions (2:02) is a self-explanatory montage (Freddy Rodriguez of "Six Feet Under" fame is the most familiar face) and a not-so-funny gag reel clocks in at three minutes, 11 seconds.

Also featured is a theatrical trailer, teaser trailer and a handful of rough-looking (and unmemorable) deleted scenes. An interactive DVD-ROM component is included, as well.

As he did in Signs, M. Night Shyamalan creates a neatly prescribed universe where everyone has their function to perform. Is the director making a spiritual statement about predestination? Is he exploring the mechanics of storytelling? Whatever it is, I think we're supposed to marvel at the allegorical nature of it. If only there had been something really worth the fuss ...