Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) manages The Cove apartment complex in Philadelphia as if it were a piece of his own extended family. He treats every resident with compassion and care, taking after their needs like an unemotional observer floating here to there trying to make their lives better. He’s a loner with a heart of gold, a man seemingly happy to take care of his residents even as his own needs are left collecting dust over next to an unlit fireside. But his secrets are painful, Heep far more willing to deal with his tenants’ problems that look at the scars hidden by his past.

All that changes when he discovers the mysterious Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) living apparently underneath the complex’s swimming pool. She claims to be some sort of mythological creature called a Narf, sent to The Cove to inspire one of the residents to write a book that could change the direction of humanity. But standing in her way is a vicious, wolf-like animal eager to slaughter her, and if Story’s tale is to be believed than it might just be up to Cleveland to save his new friend from almost certain death.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film “Lady in the Water” is based upon a bedtime story he wrote for his children. It was also directly responsible for his leaving Disney and taking up residence at Warner Bros. The Mouse House didn’t like his script, thought it needed more work, and weren’t inclined to drop $60-plus million dollars upon it when the whole thing looked like nothing more than an expensive no-star ego-driven vanity project.

In all honesty, I can’t say Disney was wrong in their assessment. The film bristles with Shyamalan’s ego, some of his artistic decisions, including that of casting himself in a pivotal role as a man who may be the world’s intellectual savior, so absurd they’re almost laughable. There’s much here that’s truly histrionic in its ineptness, and telling the writer-director to consider a rewrite to make things more cohesive and less unintentionally silly wasn’t exactly bad advice.

But for all its faults, and my does it have plenty, the craftsmanship on display and the mysteriously melancholic mood the director effortlessly weaves are so intoxicating “Lady in the Water” couldn’t help but win me over. Reservations aside, and while I’m sure my sentiments won’t land me anywhere close to the majority of critical opinion, this is one picture where I’m almost glad to be swimming against the metaphorical tide.

Listen, Shyamalan deserves much of the heat he’s taking right now, and if we were talking about “The Village” I’d probably be right there joining in on the chorus. (If there is a movie I felt more infuriated about these last few years, I can’t recall it. That one, thanks to its absurd third act twist, really ticked me off.) No two ways about it, the combined successes of “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable” and “Signs” were probably far more gigantic than the talented young filmmaker deserved. Newsweek even went so far as to proclaim him the next Spielberg (perhaps that hadn’t seen his first film, the astonishingly awful “Wide Awake”), and to all appearances it sure as heck looked like the man was starting to believe the hype.

Still, just because he makes a few statements he shouldn’t and casts himself in parts he has no business playing that doesn’t make him any less of a dynamic filmmaker behind the camera. Shyamalan knows how to tell a story, knows how to spin yarns that keep audiences fascinated beginning to end, and for me “Lady in the Water” proved to be no exception. As silly as it gets I was almost shocked to find myself so completely swept up within its mythic entrails, my decent into quiet tears at the conclusion as perfectly unexpected as finding a favorite flower sitting on my desktop left their by a secret admirer.

Make no mistakes, the leap of faith required here to fall under the film’s spell is a big one. Shyamalan’s fairy tale is almost too childish and simple minded to ever be taken as seriously as he’d obviously like. The mysteries lying within are obvious and hackneyed, and the director can’t help but set himself up for at least a partial drubbing by making his main foil a self-absorbed film critic (played with just the right hint of irony by Bob Balaban). I’m also getting tired of the director’s solemn insistence on playing things with such pompous sincerity, the inherent fun a whimsical tale like this should have unfortunately missing much of the way through.

That said, as things moved on I became more and more fascinated by this bedtime story. Christopher Doyle’s (“Hero”) cinematography is stunningly masterful; thanks to him there is a richness and grand eloquence to the visuals which, as good as they have been for the director in the past, reach stratospheric heights here. (Apparently, Doyle and Shyamalan hated one another, but as good as this film looks you’d never know it.) Add in James Newton Howard’s (“Batman Begins”) fantastic score and you’ve got an hypnotic milieu almost impossible to beat.

Yet is Giamatti’s powerfully multifaceted performance that really brought the movie home for me. Howard is fine (although she doesn’t make near the impact she did in “The Village,” her mesmeric portrayal by far the best there) but it is the Oscar-nominated character actor who kept me riveted. The more absurd Shyamalan’s script got, the more forceful and mesmerizing Giamatti became. There is a moment late in the film that, on paper, should never have worked. With the veteran at the controls, however, this silly sermon of comical melodrama nearly broke my heart, Giamatti delivering a cadence of pathos, pain and forgiveness that stirred me all the way to my very soul.

It is at that moment when I knew “Lady in the Water” had me in the palm of its raggedly disheveled hands. Even as a voice in the back of my mind screamed at me to hold my nose up and cringe, instead I found myself reaching into my purse for a tissue, even the sight of a giant bird swooping down out of the heavens not enough to still my tears. Shyamalan’s comeuppance for treating associates like cattle and audiences like captured sheep is certainly coming and maybe this will indeed be the movie to do it. But not for me, the talented writer-director getting one more reprieve, and like a fairy tale coming to its climax I can’t wait to see what the man’s next chapter is going to explore.