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Review by David DiMichele

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Nothing in this film bears any resemblance to M. Night Shyamalans’ previous morbid and dull thriller, Lady in the Water. The Happening departs from that film and from all of the director's previous films, to focus instead on a theme that resonates deeply with our world’s current situation - terrible things happen to people but no one knows why. The result is a slowly building suspense film that binds reality and imagination together in ways that only a master bedtime storyteller could do.

And that is exactly what The Happening is: a surreal dream (although at 90 minutes it stalls just a tiny bit along the way). The way that Shyamalan captures everyday people of the east coast frantically fleeing from an unknown evil is pure B movie bliss. The expressions on the character’s faces, the characters themselves and the feel of the movie could even be regarded as “campy” as the film provides a good laugh even when the occasion calls for seriousness. At times you might think the actors are acting poorly. But remember: the people who are fleeing from this unnamed evil aren’t superheroes or warriors. They are “everyday” people and act as we would in their situation. Character that meet along the way are ones who could quite possibly meet in real life. The casting is spot on (that hot dog guy sure is a hoot).

Above all The Happening thrives on the opportunity to offer commentary on our world by means of a silly yet fascinating plot. The focus is on the death of mankind and we are given endless scenes that add fuel to that fire. In Central Park we see people stopping dead in their tracks, losing their train of thought, walking backwards and mumbling phrases over and over again. Then they kill themselves. In a haunting scene construction workers free fall from the top of a building, plummeting to the ground with the sounds that make you cringe. Police officers kill themselves with their own pistols and then those same pistols are picked up by pedestrians who kill themselves as well. An assortment of unsettling sights come by the boatload, such as dead men hanging from trees and a man settling himself underneath a tractor. At first this is all labeled a “terrorist attack” and New York City is evacuated.

Shyamalan shows us a society where the main emotion is panic, and only panic. Our hero is a Philadelphia school teacher, Elliot Moore, played totally out of the ’tough guy’ character that Mark Wahlberg is known for playing. Elliot is a man who is trying to deal with his wife Alma’s (Zooey Deschannel) trust issues while constantly reassuring his friend Julian (John Lequizamo) and Julian’s daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) that Jess's mom is safe. It turns out that he, along with everyone else, is just a citizen living in a state of panic but trying really hard to conceal it. All of them are on a train, with others who have no clue as to what is going on. They are heading for Pennsylvania but the ride comes to a halt when it is suspected that the bizarre evil might be ahead of them and everyone is left stunned because they have no clue what they’re even fleeing from.

Maybe the entire East Coast panics because of the infinite number of power plants that puff out black rings of smoke or because we are quick to point the finger at the terrorist attacks that happened on 9/11, the results of which we still aren’t able to shake. Then there is the issue of blaming everything that happens on the government or heck, even saying “the president planned these attacks.” Each one of these issues are exposed and while Shyamalan never really sides with a certain one, he makes us feel that it could be any or everything.

This may not be the conventional summer film people are looking for but it does contain the most indestructible villain this summer and is a great antidote to all the CGI-heavy films. The landscape, which is captured beautifully by Shyamalan, is a character in and of itself as our heroes try to escape their sterile, barren and windswept surroundings. The scares and chills  are emphasized by this and by the way the camera pans closely to a character’s blank expression and by how people affected by the unseen evil are driven to kill themselves. It’s almost as if the victims are saying “We're fed up with the world and we're not going to take it anymore!” The world may just be saying the same thing. This may be Shyamalan’s only movie that could one day happen. The Happening doesn’t make you ask the question: can this happen, but makes you ask: when is this going to happen?

Film Rating: *** out of ****

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