There's a big challenge to overcome with this movie as a viewer. It needs to be accepted on its own terms and approach toward storytelling and myth. Otherwise you're liable to end up like the film critic character, whose skepticism and confidence in predicting how a story "should" play out prevents him from understanding/appreciating the story in front of him as it is.

Gives me a similar feeling as when I recently rewatched Attack of the Clones. I could tell that George Lucas, like Shyamalan here, knew very well what he was trying to do with that movie. With AOTC, I didn't connect as much with what Lucas was trying to do there, but it's enough for me that I can recognize all the intentionality in the work. With Lady in the Water, I connect with it more and so it's easier for me to enjoy even when there are still gaps in my connection to Shyamalan's vision. Again, his intentionality is clear.

This comes across as a more personal movie than Shyamalan usually makes. I think the most important takeaway here is that this is his passion and belief in the power of stories themselves distilled into its own myth. There are multiple layers here, as with Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense, but more of them are kept implicit instead of explicit. I think the personal nature of the film is why Shyamalan's not spelling out as much of this for the audience's benefit. It's not essential that the audience understand or even recognize all of the personal or metatextual subtext as much as feel the emotions invoked by their presence while focusing on this bedtime story come to life.

Yes, it's easy to identify how Story herself is a literal muse to Shyamalan's self-acted character of Vick, which is an example of some of the subtext being made explicit, except that the fairy tale is already about a special being's mission to inspire a storyteller, so the surface text becomes the subtext and then becomes the surface text again. Are you dizzy? It's a self-aware story that still chooses to play itself straight, which is unusual for a Hollywood film.

Because Lady in the Water is literally a fairy tale, it's exactly as simple as it seems and also more complex for that sincerity. There's quite a bit about grief, isolation, communication and metatextual thoughts on storytelling and filmmaking here that are allowed to play more secondary and subtle roles. The point is to let the bedtime story speak for itself and demonstrate the essential power Shyamalan believes it holds. His familiar optimism and hopefulness are more subtle this time: it's the film itself and that he made it at all. Believing that even though not everybody will connect with it, for somebody/somebodies out there (and not just Shyamalan himself) it could change their life for the better. Maybe even save it.