Plato's Cave is an allegory of the sense of self and the fallacy of correctly interpreting the world around us. In his estimation, it is impossible to truly deduce what is happening outside of our own heads, because the only thing we really experience is our brain's reconstruction of events. In his story, a prisoner is tied up in a cave facing away from the entrance, and he begins to create a story of the world outside the cave based only on the shifting shadows he can see from his vantage point.
In the movie The Village, the village-people are held within a compound that is believed to be in the 1800's, and there are wild beasts that keep them trapped inside. In reality, they are in modern times, and the ranking members of the Village are keeping them inside and pretending to be the beasts to prevent them from leaving.
The two tales echo one another in that the only reality we can understand is that which is directly in front of us. The villagers, like the prisoner, do not see the outside, and therefore assume it is like their village and that the beasts are real beasts. They have no experience in the outside world and therefore no ability to comprehend that their world is not at all what they think it is.
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