Review: The Happening

(At the end of the day, this warning won't matter much, but there are major SPOILERS ahead.)


I wanted to like "The Happening," I really did. Ever since I saw "The Sixth Sense" as a younger kid, I've been a huge fan of M. Night Shyamalan. "Unbreakable" is still one of the most underrated big-studio films ever, and the man has a true gift for suspense/horror storytelling. Even when "The Village" ripped off its twist ending from a young adult novel, I stuck by him. I even enjoyed "Lady In The Water" quite a bit, and spent many a night arguing its merits against the vast majority of people who absolutely hated it. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that I say that I have absolutely no defense for "The Happening." Frankly, it's pretty terrible.

The film surrounds Elliot and Alma Moore (Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel), a couple on the verge of divorce, who are reunited by a global crisis. Namely, the fact that something is happening (See what I did there? I'll be here 'till Thursday...) that is causing people to commit suicide in extravagant, horror film-friendly fashion. For reasons never really explained, instead of hiding indoors until the danger passes (why this would work, I'll get to in a minute), they opt to head across the northeast United States in search of safety, answers and a plot. They fail to find any of the above.

I could probably write a small book on the ways in which this film fails, but I'll hone in on the most glaring instances. For one, Wahlberg and Deschanel have absolutely no chemistry as a couple, or even as lead actors. Wahlberg periodically tries to bail the film out, but to no avail. I have as much a crush on Deschanel as the next film geek, but this is one of those roles that might force her to negotiate the indie circuit for a while, and will render her box office kryptonite for studio films. To be fair, though, pretty much everybody in this movie will suffer a similar fate, except for Wahlberg, if only because he has an Oscar nomination to his credit. The acting is so audaciously wooden that one has to really wonder exactly who watched this film and figured it warranted being designated as a summer tentpole release. If this is what passes as a quality horror film to studio executives, a lot will start to make sense regarding the state of movies today.

The best sequences in the film, relatively speaking, are the gruesome suicide sequences, of which there are at once a great amount and not enough. One sequence, in which a man calmly feeds himself to lions, belongs in a better movie. The same could be said for most of the horror sequences; even in a film this terrible, Shyamalan still knows how to frame a shock sequence. Occasionally, the audience is even lulled into thinking that the film is about to pick up. This never happens, which leads me to my next point.

If Shyamalan's seeming disregard for putting effort into anything but the violent sequences put the gun in the mouth of this movie, the screenplay pulls the trigger. If questions can be raised about who allowed this film to be released, I'm even more intrigued by the idea of who read the script and thought it was a good idea. The only reason writing this god-awful got through, most likely, is owing to the fact that Shyamalan wrote the screenplay himself. Had some unknown submitted this to the studio, it would likely have only existed for the sake of being passed around as an inter-office joke. Dialogue more or less only exists in the film when it serves the purpose of exposition, and even then, it seems like it was written by a college student in an introductory screenwriting class, who's never watched a horror movie or written anything before.

Let it be known that I'm not taking pleasure in lighting into this film. I think Shyamalan just needs to adapt a screenplay, rather than writing his own material. The man has talent, but something has gone terribly awry. Why not revisit those rumors of his directing the film adaptation of "Life of Pi"? A story like that would be perfectly suited to his talents. At the end of the day, though, "The Happening" is his first true directorial misfire, in virtually every way. With every one of his other films, I left the theater saying "Oh...wow...". With this one, all I could muster was "Umm...what?"