Shyamalan Isn't As 'Happening' As He Used To Be

by Brett Parker

If M. Night Shyamalan had never directed The Happening, I’d probably label the film as being a “second-rate Shyamalan knockoff.” The film has the director’s look and feel, yet it lacks the magic that made his best films so special. To be sure, it has a concept that’s just as fascinating as his previous works, yet it lacks the patience, nuances, and production values we’d expect from him. This film proves that Shyamalan on a lesser day can still make an entertaining film, but where’s the skilled horror of The Sixth Sense? Where’s the emotional impact of Signs?

The film opens on a fall day in Central Park, NY. Two girls sit on a park bench while one of them notices that everyone in the park has stopped moving dead in their tracks. Everyone surrounding them is as still as statues. The one girl turns and realizes that the other girl has stabbed herself in the neck with a hair pin. This is a morbid pattern that begins happening throughout the northeast. Countless people find themselves frozen in their tracks and seeking gruesome ways to kill themselves. It is realized that a deadly toxin is flowing through the air and causing this deadly epidemic at a rapid rate.

News of the outbreak reaches a high school in New York. This causes Science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his colleague Julian (John Leguizamo) to flee the state and head towards Pennsylvania. Elliot grabs his conflicted wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), while Julian gets his introverted daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), as they flee the state by train. Yet halfway on the trip, everyone on the train is abandoned in the small town of Filbert, PA after a railway employee informs Elliot that the train lost contact with “everyone.” The survivors begin to realize that the deadly toxins will soon catch up with them and they struggle not only to survive, but to figure out what is possibly causing this deadly plague. Is it a terrorist threat? An act of God? Elliot soon realizes that it just might be a disturbing mechanism of nature.

Before I list off descriptions of the film’s flaws, don’t think I’m one of those skeptical critics out to see Shyamalan fail. It’s very much the opposite: I’m a huge fan of his work. Shyamalan, along with Cameron Crowe and Michael Mann, is a director I secretly root for and consider to be one of my favorites for these times. Unbreakable and Signs are two of my favorite movies ever and The Village was on my list of the ten best films of 2004. And while I admit Lady in the Water was Shyamalan’s weakest film, I enjoyed it and found many positive things within the material. What I like about his films is the way he takes concepts that would’ve thrilled me as a 12-year-old and brings a dramatic maturity to them that satisfies both the child and the intellectual in me at the same time, a feat very few directors can pull off. He always achieves this with a minimalist skill that packs a giant cinematic punch. Of course, many critics are out to nail Shyamalan due to his ego and commercial values, yet it would be wiser to let the films speak for themselves, for as I see it, they speak wonderfully.

If any other director had made The Happening, I probably would’ve been easier on it. Obviously, I hold Shyamalan’s work to an exceptional standard and it’s hard to buy this film outright when I know he’s capable of so much more. Yet the film’s hopes for greatness weren’t completely out of reach. It’s the technical aspects that hold the film back from being more powerful. This is strange, considering the perfectionist Shyamalan can be behind the camera. Usually, he has a unique visual scheme behind his films that make even throwaway shots look extremely relevant to the film’s atmosphere. His framing of shots helped strengthen the comic book scheme of Unbreakable and the menacing vastness of the woods in The Village, all with a pacing that takes its time to build suspense. Here, things move in a lazier manner. There are too many tight and unremarkable shots that move along at a pace that’s too quick for its own good. We never get the strong sense of emptiness and tension that the characters are experiencing. It also doesn’t help that James Newton Howard’s musical work, which reached sublime heights in Shyamalan’s past films, underscores nearly every scene here, diminishing the haunting silence that almost serves as the director’s trademark.

Consider the film’s most unforgettable scene, in which Elliot, Alma, and Jess join two pre-teen boys they meet in asking gun-toting locals for food. What proceeds to happen in that scene is undoubtedly the most viscous thing Shyamalan has ever unleashed on an audience. Yet the scene contains a laughable slow-motion shot, a line of bad dialogue, and an extreme close-up of emotional overkill that immediately harms the overall effect of the scene. More thoughtful and subtle staging could’ve retained a more harrowing sting. Mistakes like this can be found all throughout the film. A scene where a man gets attacked by an animal demonstrates Shyamalan’s defeated confession that he’s not the best with CGI. Then there’s the curious case of Mrs. Jones (Betty Buckley), an eccentric recluse the main trio meets on their journey for safety. Hers is a subplot of, shall I say, anticlimactic lunacy. Her behavior is so bizarre and counter-productive to the plot that you immediately question its reason for existing in the first place. Perhaps she is meant to represent the startling alternative to the everyday society that harms the environment? Maybe she demonstrates to Elliot and Alma what a life without love looks like? Either way, her meaning is never highlighted in an effective way and we’re left scratching our heads and laughing unintentionally.

Despite its flaws, The Happening is still a competent film with big ideas and likeable characters. It’s on par with an entertaining B-Movie, and it’s truly better than half the horror thrillers Hollywood churns out eat year (thinking of Dark Water and the Ring series makes me realize how much more inane this film could’ve been). I loved the film’s ideas about the environment taking revenge on mankind and Shyamalan brings a hushed realism and unforgiving hostility to it that makes it truly scary. Only a filmmaker like Shyamalan could make plants seem scary and I can’t remember a film where they came across more threatening (sorry Little Shop of Horrors). And while the actors wrestle with bad dialogue and underwritten characters, they are all competent and convincing. Wahlberg and Deschanel bring a likeable spirit to their characters; it’s especially fun watching the minimalist action star Wahlberg play a quirky science teacher. I liked their characters so much that I wish there were more scenes highlighting the marital stress between them. The film’s climax is meant to be a major romantic triumph (Shyamalan tries to capture the emotional impact of the Signs climax) and while I appreciated the effort, we know too little about this couple to get that worked up.

So we can basically chalk this up as a minor Shyamalan work. It’s likeable and entertaining, but it’s destined to be a more obscure mark in his filmography. Even Hitchcock had films like those. But after Lady in the Water, this film, and the fact that his next project is an adaptation of a Nickelodeon cartoon, I hope he’s able to recapture that popcorn magic he had so strongly in the past. Like a good Shyamalan film, I hope a big twist is coming real soon.