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The Happening

As a M. Night Shyamalan fan, I was eager to see The Happening. Did Mr. Shyamalan learn anything from 2006’s colossal disaster, Lady in the Water? Or will his mistakes just keep happening? Sadly, The Happening could not live up to the promise of a good idea.

The brisk film stars Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo. Shyamalan directed, wrote, and produced the film. Wahlberg and Leguizamo are Philadelphia high school teachers who teach science and math, respectively. Elliot Moore (Wahlberg), his wife Alma (Deschanel), and friend Julian (Leguizamo) flee Philly to seek refuge outside of the city when they receive reports of a terrorist attack in New York City. Some kind of gas causes people to stop what they are doing, become confused, and ruthlessly kill themselves. Eventually, it is revealed that it isn’t a terrorist attack that plagues the Northeastern part of the United States, but a natural toxin released by plants that cause 99.9 percent of the population to kill themselves – often with very graphic, violent methods.

This film echoes similar themes from the novel, Cell, where Stephen King explored the ideas of technological triggers causing humanity to devolve into unthinking killers. Except in Shyamalan’s vision, it is humanity’s causal disregard for our planet that does us all in. After the event, scientists conclude that what happened was like a “red tide - the first sign that the planet is rejecting humans as pests.” And of course, once things have returned to normal, the last scene of the movie hammers home how important it is to respect our environment by showing another “happening” happening again in Paris.

I will give Shyamalan credit for creating suspense and knowing how to make his audience jump in their seats. The many explicit, disturbing suicides in the film begin early on with a young woman abruptly puncturing her neck. The mayhem progresses down a conveyer belt as a police officer’s revolver passes from dead to soon to be dead hands on a street in Philadelphia.

However, Shyamalan fails to deliver entertaining dialogue and characters. The dynamic between Elliot and Alma is unbelievable. The idea that they fall in love again after the event that they both survive lacks depth and seems half-baked based on what is set up throughout the movie. Perhaps that was Shyamalan’s vision, but it just doesn’t seem credible to me.

In Lady in the Water, he played a much bigger role than he ever did in any of his previous movies. In The Happening, he took the negative reaction to his self-indulgent supporting role in Lady and minimized his role in this film to a mere voice on the telephone.

The germ of an idea that was so promising killed itself thanks to a toxic blend of thin characters, banal dialogue, and some truly ridiculous action. (Quick everybody, we must outrun the wind to survive!) Ultimately, the idea failed because Shyamalan’s tunnel vision and iron grip on it never allowed the idea to develop on its own. In his debut film, The Sixth Sense, he didn’t have complete control and his vision was realized. I must agree with Ross Douthat of the Atlantic Monthly, in his film review for National Review. Douthat believes that The Happening’s “target audience seems to be the heckling robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 . . .”

Written by: Heather Tetreault

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