MAYBE DECADES FROM NOW, we will look back on M. Night Shyamalan’s “Lady in the Water” as an under-appreciated visionary classic like Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” Maybe. For now, we can only scratch our heads and wonder if Asian America’s most successful filmmaker has finally peaked after a string of hits, “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs” among them.

Shyamalan’s latest movie is a bizarre fairytale set in a dumpy apartment complex in suburb Philadelphia that simply didn’t work for many viewers, or for the critics, who sparred no waterlogged pun in slamming “Lady,” which opened weakly this summer and remains far from recouping its $75 million production costs.

Based on a bedtime story the Indian American director created for his young daughters, “Lady” tells the tale of a nymph-like girl named Story (played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who also starred in Shyamalan’s “The Village”) and Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), the sad-sack superintendent who discovers her hiding in the passageway to his apartment building’s swimming pool. It turns out that the pasty young woman is a Narf—a character from an old bedtime story—who is trapped in our world and must make a perilous journey back to her Blue World. Soon Cleveland and his fellow oddball tenants come to realize that they may also be characters in this fantastical story unfolding around them.

I was somewhat inclined to be generous with “Lady” because it seems to be more of a filmic experiment than a coherent narrative. Because Shyamalan broke down that fourth wall between artist and audience by presenting himself as a central character (a writer whose book is destined to change the world, no less), the movie feels like a conversation Shyamalan is trying to have with the audience about art and how a writer’s ideas can seep into our consciousness—how words like orcs and muggles and maybe Narfs become part of our cultural vocabulary.

At its best, while watching “Lady in the Water,” I was reminded of Luigi Pirandello’s story, “Six Characters In Search of An Author.” Shyamalan’s seems to be exploring what happens when a story comes looking for the writer, and what happens as others try to take part in the story meant for others. We see the characters fumble around, some not understanding their true roles, some getting the story but not finding any joy in it. All interesting concerns for artists, if not a general audience. Shyamalan has a lot of ideas going on and perhaps the movie’s excesses are a result of the director trying to surprise even himself, while we get to watch. Sadly, rather than bearing witness to a thing of beauty, it’s more like watching your parents French kiss in wet leather.

Yellow on yellow crime?

What bothers me the most about “Lady in the Water” is the way Shyamalan treats the Asian American actresses in the movie. Watching his parade of screeching clichés was like watching a yellow on yellow crime taking place.

Cindy Cheung from Greg Pak’s “Robot Stories,” for example, is given terrible material to work with here as Young Soon, a freaky character cribbed from a Cliff’s Notes edition of “The Joy Luck Club” and the “Me so horny” prostitute in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” Poor Cindy has to belt out over-the-top lines like “Mr. Heep, it’s time we show them that some stories are real!” in a whiny FOB voice that sounds like some thug with cleats kicking alley cats for fun. Her hair alone is practically a character. With the right director, she could have been a memorable character for all the right reasons, and not just a series of hackneyed sight gags.

Playing Young Soon’s mother is June Kyoto Lu, who has previously appeared in “Big Trouble in Little China,” “Seinfeld,” and other film and TV roles since the 1960s. This veteran actress is treated as no more than a cheap plot device (to help explain the ancient legend of Story).

In the same way, Sarita Choudhury, who made a name for herself in Mira Nair’s groundbreaking “Mississippi Masala” (1991), is wasted as wide-eyed Anna Ran, the sister of Shyamalan’s character, who apparently feels compelled to blurt out things like “Mr. Heep is a playaa!” or “He’s hearing the voice of God through a crossword puzzle!” That she was able to retain her composure while saying these ridiculous lines is a testament to her abilities.

It may be helpful to draw a comparison: When Robert Rodriguez directs Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin and other Latino actors and actresses, even if the characters are villains, they’re always shot respectfully. You may boo and hiss, but you never feel embarrassed for them.

But this seems like a minor point in a movie that has much larger problems. No doubt, M. Night Shyamalan will recover from this stumble, but the critics aren’t likely to let the matter sink. Not when Shyamalan threw the first punch by including an embittered movie critic as a character in the movie. Who knows, maybe “Lady” will become a cult classic on DVD—like “Showgirls.”