There is a really cool apartment building with a beautiful swimming pool that has a whole heap of interesting people living there, and the superintendent is a sad guy called Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti). Then a woman appears and she is from another place, another people, and she needs to get home. A Chinese woman in the building tells of this old bedtime story and everyone believes it and plays their part despite it being weird and unbelievable.
That’s a bad summary. But it’s also true. And it really works. M. Night Shyamalan has had varying level of success with his film, but he certainly can tell a story. And while the fact that everyone in the film just went along with it made no real sense, it also worked quite nicely.