Review: The Happening

The Happening

By: Lee Rice

Although his new film is about a wave of unexplained mass suicides, M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Happening” thankfully won’t make audiences follow suit.

After the dual blows of “The Village” and the even more abysmal “Lady in the Water,” it seemed that Shyamalan had lost the creativity which made “The Sixth Sense,” “Signs,” and “Unbreakable” such successes. “The Happening” reconnects him with the dreamlike, nightmarish quality that made his first films so successful. His trademark use of silence and simple musical scores accentuates every scene, and gives everything an eerie, surreal feeling.

The dreamlike feeling extends to the performances, and I have to give some real props to Mark Wahlberg and John Leguizamo. It seems that there is a strange sort of acting style that goes with Shyamalan’s films, where even the actors don’t seem to know whether they are dreaming or not, and they really manage to pull it off.

Although this slight touch of the subconscious helps to pull things off, actress Zooey Deschanel, who plays Wahalberg’s emotionally distant wife Alma, seriously overdoes it. Her performance here makes her seem like she‘s been severely medicated, a sharp contrast to the anxiety that the other actors channel.

This is Shyamalan’s first “R” rated effort, and when I first heard that he was doing something more adult, I thought it was a last, desperate attempt to pull in an audience by pumping up the gore. The trailer, which showed several hanging bodies and a construction site that was literaly "raining men," seemed to confirm my suspicions.

Fortunately, I was wrong, and none of the violence is overdone. When it comes, it seems very appropriate to the situation and has a bizarre, “A History of Violence” feel to it, with the human damage remaining incidental rather than existing as the focus of the scene. Even the most gruesome death scene in the film, involving a piece of industrial yard equipment, is shot in a clinical way that evokes more sadness for the victim than disgust at the gruesomeness of it all. The fact that the main characters are helpless to stop others from being killed adds an unexpected emotional element to the film, and the grade-A acting really gets the hopelessness of their situation across.

Since his first film, “The Sixth Sense,” one of the major draws for M. Night’s films is the twist; the little hook that ties everything together and makes you re-evaluate the entire film up to that point. “The Sixth Sense” revealed that the psychologist was actually a ghost, “Unbreakable” had the revelation that Mr. Glass was responsible for the train wreck, and “Signs” forced the audience to rethink what the whole point of the movie was.

It seemed that Shyamalan’s career was in a decline after “The Village‘s” awkward and forced “it’s actually the modern day and the monster is really a retarded man-child in a hedgehog suit” twist, and it seems that Shyamalan has learned his lesson since then. “The Happening” is well written, and when the end comes it doesn’t feel forced or overly sappy like the last two, and it’s good to see that M. Night has learned he doesn’t always have to insert a hook at the end, regardless of whether it fits or not.

Now for the real problem. Even though it has a pretty short run time, only about 90 minutes, “The Happening” feels markedly light on content.

The movie’s first act sets the main characters on the run, and that’s all well and exciting, but it seems that there just isn’t all that much going on past that point. Yes, there are a few good scares here and there along the way, but I can’t help but feel that more could have been done with the premise.

As it is, the movie is still entertaining, and very engrossing. Sometimes, the consistent mildness of what is happening works in the movie’s favor, making it feel like an actual survivor’s account of a real incident.

In summation, it’s good to have the old M. Night back, the filmmaker who was capable of producing films that stay with you long after you left the theater. Although “The Happening” isn’t up to the same standard as his first three, one can only hope that this upward curve will continue and that we’ll be seeing more dead people, signs and things that are hard to break in the near future.