Very playful in a good way. One of the best displays of Shyamalan's self-awareness as a filmmaker--and not just because this is a movie about making a movie. That could easily be a pretentious exercise, but this is anything but. It's a simple but very precisely constructed story about controlling the world via the framing its characters impose upon it: what they choose to see, refuse to see, and/or make excuses for. And then there's the social performances they put on for others and themselves to maintain that control.

Shyamalan is a storyteller first and foremost. He works within a visual medium, but he doesn't strike me as the type to present images to the audience for their own sake. There's almost always a narrative intention behind every shot. Some people seem to mistake this for a weakness in his filmmaking (i.e. like he needs to embrace the artistry of images without narrative) but it's a creative decision he makes consciously. It's not like he's been hiding that everything is about story for him from the beginning of his career.

Really fun performances and a constant tongue-in-cheek humor that extends to toying with familiar formula, genre expectations, and of course filmmaking itself. It never felt to me like Shyamalan was disrespecting the audience's intelligence with his many teases in this one. He'd just like for everybody to have a good time.