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#591 - The Happening
M. Night Shyamalan, 2008
When people start committing mass suicide for no discernible reason, a science teacher and his wife try to escape before the phenomenon gets them.
Until this year, I was pretty much able to avoid M. Night Shyamalan's very prolonged and very public fall from grace. Before, I had only seen The Sixth Sense a couple of times and my general impression was that I sort of liked it (and I still wanted to see Unbreakable). Even so, it was pretty easy to avoid watching any of his films even before his notorious dependence on twist endings led to his cultural stock dwindling away. This year saw me decide to play a bit of catch-up. I saw Signs, which wasn't altogether bad but ultimately felt too off-kilter and flawed to seriously appreciate. More recently, I saw The Last Airbender, his big-budget adaptation of the popular Avatar cartoon that managed to become his most reviled film yet (though I couldn't bring myself to muster any serious rage over its massive shortcomings - say what you will, at least he's not as overly obnoxious as Michael Bay). Now I've checked out The Happening, a film that has also suffered a severe haranguing due to its botched execution of what admittedly starts off as an intriguing premise. It begins when people suddenly stop moving in their tracks and then, after brief periods of apparent disorientation, proceed to commit suicide without any signs of distress. The phenomenon, initially thought to be the result of a terrorist attack, gradually spreads further and further from its epicentre in Central Park and soon begins affecting nearby towns and eventually other states. So far, so creepy...
Unfortunately, what happens next is that Shyamalan fails to flesh out this premise in a strong manner. The most immediate problem is probably the casting of Mark Wahlberg as a high-school science teacher who is caught up in the middle of the Happening. He is also having some relationship troubles with his wife (Zooey Deschanel), which are exacerbated when they have to leave the city with Wahlberg's colleague (John Leguizamo), who acts extremely bitter towards Deschanel as a result of said troubles. When the film's not taking time to showcase the various ways in which people are killing themselves, ranging from jumping off buildings to shooting themselves to allowing themselves to be mauled by tigers (yes, really), it's following Wahlberg and Deschanel as they try to escape to wherever might be safe. This is where The Happening falls apart as it struggles to come up with enough events to fill out its brief running time. It's a real shame that the film ends up wasting Leguizamo as he proves to be a more capable performer than Wahlberg, whose attempts to balance emotional strain with his more natural charisma end up making him look comically quizzical. This is counterbalanced by Deschanel, whose blank stare and frequently monotonous delivery are supposedly justified by her character being an emotionally distant person, though that ultimately feels like a cop-out more so than a legitimate character development.
As for the rest of the film, it starts off with an intriguing atmosphere reminiscent of creepy B-movies of old, but that is soon squandered as the depiction of people's deaths grows increasingly absurd and as the threat is depicted as little more than rustling foliage and light breezes. While there is something to be said for the less-is-more approach when it comes to making an audience feel horror, here the result is compromised not just by the fact that it's visually uninteresting, but also by how arbitrary a threat the Happening ends up being towards the different characters. The writing in other areas tends to be extremely wanting as the film not only struggles to keep the film going but also fills out its scenes with some rather shoddy writing (especially in the film's third act where the small group of survivors that we're following stumbles upon not one but two violently paranoid hermits within quick succession of one another). While there is some amusement to be had at some of the more poorly-handled moments, such as actors delivering bad dialogue with worse inflections, even that is too sporadic to seriously redeem The Happening. It still ends up being far more boring than even an unintentional comedy should be, let alone as a genuinely unsettling thriller. The fact that it does occasionally seem to get close to having a good idea only makes its general failure sting even more.
M. Night Shyamalan, 2008
When people start committing mass suicide for no discernible reason, a science teacher and his wife try to escape before the phenomenon gets them.
Until this year, I was pretty much able to avoid M. Night Shyamalan's very prolonged and very public fall from grace. Before, I had only seen The Sixth Sense a couple of times and my general impression was that I sort of liked it (and I still wanted to see Unbreakable). Even so, it was pretty easy to avoid watching any of his films even before his notorious dependence on twist endings led to his cultural stock dwindling away. This year saw me decide to play a bit of catch-up. I saw Signs, which wasn't altogether bad but ultimately felt too off-kilter and flawed to seriously appreciate. More recently, I saw The Last Airbender, his big-budget adaptation of the popular Avatar cartoon that managed to become his most reviled film yet (though I couldn't bring myself to muster any serious rage over its massive shortcomings - say what you will, at least he's not as overly obnoxious as Michael Bay). Now I've checked out The Happening, a film that has also suffered a severe haranguing due to its botched execution of what admittedly starts off as an intriguing premise. It begins when people suddenly stop moving in their tracks and then, after brief periods of apparent disorientation, proceed to commit suicide without any signs of distress. The phenomenon, initially thought to be the result of a terrorist attack, gradually spreads further and further from its epicentre in Central Park and soon begins affecting nearby towns and eventually other states. So far, so creepy...
Unfortunately, what happens next is that Shyamalan fails to flesh out this premise in a strong manner. The most immediate problem is probably the casting of Mark Wahlberg as a high-school science teacher who is caught up in the middle of the Happening. He is also having some relationship troubles with his wife (Zooey Deschanel), which are exacerbated when they have to leave the city with Wahlberg's colleague (John Leguizamo), who acts extremely bitter towards Deschanel as a result of said troubles. When the film's not taking time to showcase the various ways in which people are killing themselves, ranging from jumping off buildings to shooting themselves to allowing themselves to be mauled by tigers (yes, really), it's following Wahlberg and Deschanel as they try to escape to wherever might be safe. This is where The Happening falls apart as it struggles to come up with enough events to fill out its brief running time. It's a real shame that the film ends up wasting Leguizamo as he proves to be a more capable performer than Wahlberg, whose attempts to balance emotional strain with his more natural charisma end up making him look comically quizzical. This is counterbalanced by Deschanel, whose blank stare and frequently monotonous delivery are supposedly justified by her character being an emotionally distant person, though that ultimately feels like a cop-out more so than a legitimate character development.
As for the rest of the film, it starts off with an intriguing atmosphere reminiscent of creepy B-movies of old, but that is soon squandered as the depiction of people's deaths grows increasingly absurd and as the threat is depicted as little more than rustling foliage and light breezes. While there is something to be said for the less-is-more approach when it comes to making an audience feel horror, here the result is compromised not just by the fact that it's visually uninteresting, but also by how arbitrary a threat the Happening ends up being towards the different characters. The writing in other areas tends to be extremely wanting as the film not only struggles to keep the film going but also fills out its scenes with some rather shoddy writing (especially in the film's third act where the small group of survivors that we're following stumbles upon not one but two violently paranoid hermits within quick succession of one another). While there is some amusement to be had at some of the more poorly-handled moments, such as actors delivering bad dialogue with worse inflections, even that is too sporadic to seriously redeem The Happening. It still ends up being far more boring than even an unintentional comedy should be, let alone as a genuinely unsettling thriller. The fact that it does occasionally seem to get close to having a good idea only makes its general failure sting even more.