'The Happening'
Reviewed by Martin McGrath

I’d been there before with M Night Shyamalan’s movies. Once again we had terrible reviews and disastrous early word of mouth warning audiences off what, in the past, had always turned out to be better than average science fiction/horror films that ask more of the audience than slack-jawed staring at the screen. Unbreakable, Signs, The Village even the universally scorned Lady in the Water, I have enjoyed them all. So I proceeded to my seat for The Happening confident that as usual I would emerge singing the praises of a misunderstood director who seems condemned to spend the rest of his career expected, by audience and critics, to remake The Sixth Sense.

How wrong I was.

It isn’t that Shyamalan’s talents have entirely deserted him. An eerily effective opening sequence and the smart way he uses the rolling green plains around Philadelphia demonstrate that as a creator of images, Shyamalan remains a potent and interesting director.

But The Happening fails in almost every other respect.

The film starts in New York where, spreading out from Central Park, people start killing themselves in vast numbers. At first terrorists are blamed, but it quickly becomes clear this is a natural phenomenon that is spreading fast. In Philadelphia Elliot (Wahlberg), his wife Alma (Deschanel), brother Julian (Leguizamo) and niece Jess (Sanchez) escape the city by train but are left stranded in the countryside. Leguizamo is sidelined to search for his wife, while Wahlberg, realising that the event is attacking large groups and speculating that plants are responsible, leads his wife and niece across country.

To say that the script is clunky would be to offer the highest possible insult to clunkers. There are exchanges here, especially in the moments where people are supposed to be sharing moments of intimacy (and especially emerging from the mouth of Zooey Deschanel – an actress without discernable talent) during which I succumbed to a physical need to put my hands over my ears just to avoid hearing what was bound to come next. The words emerging from the mouths of these characters grate like nails on a blackboard.

And then there is Shyamalan’s attempt to introduce a thematic resonance to his story. Here, we see science and faith placed side by side and utterly muddled. Elliot (Wahlberg) a teacher in Philadelphia who in attempting to teach his charges about science via a discussion of Earth’s disappearing honey bees, ends up postulating what will eventually become the film’s half-arsed mantra: "Science will come up with some reason to put in the books but in the end it'll just be a theory. We will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding.”

It’s a profoundly depressing statement. Not only does it reveal Shyamalan’s own failure to understand what science does and what it is for, it also removes from him any duty to put together a meaningful plot. If things just happen and we can’t explain them, then anything can happen – and in The Happening, anything does happen – and it happens for no good reason. The result is a film utterly without dramatic tension. We’re practically told from the start that the lead characters are going to survive and the director also tells us that he doesn’t have to explain why, so what point is there in the audience caring about what happens.

Were this a better film I’d be tempted to launch into a tirade against the hopeless anti-rationalism at the heart of this film – but to be honest, when a director and cast have clearly given so little of themselves to the project, it is difficult to summon up the energy to give this horrible little film the critical kicking it richly deserves.

It is distressing to see a director of Shyamalan’s obvious capabilities reduced to the production of shallow, silly and witless pap like this. The Happening is Shyamalan’s worst film by some distance, and is best avoided.