Perfect fantasy OR film failure?

M. Night Shyamalan settles into a chair in his dining room, examining the movie posters from a career defined by hits – “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable,” “Signs,” “The Village” – and wonders whether he has lost his touch.

“Maybe I’ve had a disconnect with people,” he says. “Maybe the wine and food I like isn’t the wine and food everyone else likes now.”

It’s a remarkable admission for a man whose four big-studio pictures have taken in more than $2 billion in theaters and home video sales.

But it has been a remarkable 18 months for Shyamalan, 35.

In just a year and a half, he has parted ways with Disney, the studio that distributed all of his big movies. He has cooperated with a new tell-all book, “The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale,” that details the split and vilifies Disney executives.

But most disconcerting is a question that has been nagging at him for months: Has he made a movie no one wants to see?

“Lady in the Water” opens today with a lot of reputations at stake. Disney executives will be watching the film’s performance to validate their decision to end the relationship with Shyamalan. Warner Bros. will be watching the same numbers to justify their giving him $70 million to make the film and, they hope, more.

No one’s credibility, though, is more on the line than Shyamalan’s. Early reviews for “Lady in the Water” have generally been poor. Newsweek, which once put Shyamalan on its cover under the title “The Next Spielberg,” is now calling for a “career intervention” to address his arrogance.

Lately, Shyamalan concedes, he has caught himself agreeing with the criticisms.

“In your darker moments, you worry that your tastes have rarefied,” he says. “It’s very possible that’s what’s happening. And in the event that ‘Lady’ doesn’t find its audience, that’s going to be looming over me.”

Yet for all the questions and self-doubt, Shyamalan says he has found an inner peace he rarely has known as a director.

“Even if it’s a financial disaster,” he says, “I know it’s going to work out, because I got to make the movie I was dreaming to make.”

It was a movie he had planned to make with Disney. But tensions began to mount after 2004’s “The Village,” about a blind girl who must enter woods she believes are haunted to save her fiance. Although it took in $114 million domestically and $142 million overseas, the movie underperformed for a Shyamalan picture and was raked by critics.

He knew “Lady” would be a hard sell. Born of a bedtime story he told his daughters, the fantasy stars Paul Giamatti as an apartment building superintendent who rescues a sea nymph, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, whom he finds in his swimming pool.

“It’s a modern-day fantasy,” says Shyamalan, who reworked the script six times.

“It isn’t a traditional scary movie for me to sell,” he adds. “It doesn’t have a twist ending. I expected it would send a lot of mixed signals to people who perceive me as a certain type of director.”

At a dinner with Disney executives in February 2005, it became clear that the movie had not scored well with the studio. Shyamalan says that when Disney President Nina Jacobson rattled off a list of concerns she had about the movie – including his decision to give himself a meaty role, and a scene in which a movie critic is mauled – he lost his composure.

He left the restaurant vowing that he was through with Disney, even though the studio offered to produce the film with a $60 million budget and the freedom to make “Lady” any way he wanted.

Shyamalan says money had nothing to do with the split. Instead, he says, he felt Disney had lost faith in him.

“They didn’t like the movie. They weren’t saying ‘Let’s work it out.’ They weren’t saying ‘Tell me how you’re going to fix it.’ It wasn’t like that,” he says.

“Warner Bros. loves the movie. That’s important to me. Until they loved it, I wasn’t happy.”

Shyamalan has spent much of his life seeking approval. When he was admitted to New York University’s film school, he says, his father told him, “It’s not Princeton.” When Newsweek put him on its cover, he says his father reminded him the magazine had a smaller circulation than Time.

Disney, Shyamalan says, “was very much a parent to me, one that I wanted to please. I thought I would make movies for Disney until I was an old man. But at some point, the child has to decide to go on his own.”

But will audiences follow?

Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com says that “Lady” could be a hard sell “because it seems to fall somewhere in between a fairy tale and a horror movie. It’s not well defined, at least in the ads.”

He’s quick to add, though, that “Shyamalan is still a director who attracts an audience by his name alone. There aren’t many of those around.”

There also aren’t many filmmakers “who evoke such strong feelings, on both sides of the fence,” says Howard, the daughter of director Ron Howard, who also starred in “The Village.”

“His movies polarize people because they’re so emotional,” she says. “And he’s uncompromising about the story he wants to tell. I think the feelings run the gamut from obsession to hatred for him. But whatever you’re feeling, it’s un-ignorable.”

Shyamalan concedes that the battle with Disney over “Lady in the Water” might have overshadowed his reason for making it.

“If this doesn’t do well, maybe I’ll realize that I was so worried about getting it made that I didn’t realize I had something that doesn’t reach audiences,” he says.

There may even be something cathartic about the movie failing, he adds.

“Maybe what would really help is a complete disaster – something that would clean the slate,” Shyamalan says. “People could trash me to oblivion, say I’m done. Then there are no great expectations. There’s nowhere to go but up.”

Still, this is one film where he’ll try to tune out the skeptics, the studio execs, the box office analysts.

“This is the movie my kids wanted to see get made,” he says. “It’s the movie I wanted to make. No matter what happens, I love this movie.”