The Happening

M Night Shyamalan is drawn to the supernatural like a moth to a light. So when a bunch of high school biology students kick around theories for the unexplained disappearance of tens of thousands of honey bees in the last couple of years, it's no surprise that the hypothesis their teacher, Mr Moore (Mark Wahlberg) likes best is that this is a natural event we will probably never fully understand.

Let that be a lesson to us all, because while audiences will probably spend a good deal of the trim 91 minutes that make up The Happening trying to deduce what is causing the deathwish that sweeps through the Northeastern United States, the explanation remains tentative and mysterious. In other words, the sting in this tale is that there isn't one.

Whether audiences are ready to embrace that kind of ambiguity time will tell soon enough, but much of The Happening plays to Shyamalan's strengths; his knack for extracting atmosphere, mystery and suspense through the simplest means, like camera placement and depth of field.

Whatever it is that is going on, it starts one morning in Central Park, New York City. Suddenly people stop going where they're going. They just stand there.

In maybe the movie's most chilling sequence, construction workers a few blocks away are horrified when one of their mates falls to the ground from eight stories up. They've barely registered that one when another hits the pavement. Then another, and another ' they're just stepping off into thin air.

It may or may not be conscious, but these images can't help but remind us of office workers plummeting from the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's surely not coincidence that this 'event', as it's referred to, gets underway in New York City.

Mr Moore, his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and his friend Julian (John Leguizamo) are about 100 miles away in Philadelphia. Everyone's first assumption is that this is another terrorist attack, some sort of air-borne virus. Philly should be safe enough, but all the same, the authorities close the schools, and the trio ' plus Julian's young daughter ' get the first train out of the city.

Too bad for them, the train stops in the middle of nowhere ' Filbert, Pennsylvania ' and the driver refuses to go on. There's no longer anyone responding from up ahead. Cell phones and TV news reports confirm the epidemic is spreading. In fact it's all around them.

The film strongly conveys the sense of disbelief and hopelessness of being overtaken by a cataclysmic event, the precariousness of our reliance on technology and power.

In that sense, it's reminiscent of Michael Haneke's Time Of The Wolf (both were likely influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's superior The Birds).

This is being touted as Shyamalan's first hard 'R' rated movie in the US (here it's Certificate 15). It's certainly his most graphic. Even so, it's hard to tell if some of the gore is intended to induce horror or giggles ' a video clip of a zoo-keeper holding out his arms to a pride of hungry lions, is vaguely Pythonesque, as is the moment when a chap fires up a large lawnmower then lies down in front of it.

This shock and awe stuff isn't really the director's forte. He's much more at home with subtle disquiet' the way an old rope swing creaks on a tree branch, for example.

If you've read anything at all about The Happening you probably know that on some level it's an eco parable. I'm not going to divulge anything here, only to say that there's got to be more to it than that. Two things you might want to bear in mind as you watch: in the past Shyamalan has said that all his films are about faith. And the name 'Alma' is of course Spanish for 'soul'. Oh, and that mood ring? That's hardly an incidental detail either.

Intriguing as it is, The Happening is only a partial return to form for Shyamalan. I liked the film's even tempo and composed surface ' a welcome change from the hyper handheld camera and quick cuts we get in movies like [Rec], Cloverfield and 28 Weeks Later ' but it does allow us time to ponder several leaps in the film's internal logic, and resent how much information he is forced to pack into media reports.

The performances are okay (Deschanel is always interesting, with her amazingly big blue eyes), but they seem a little numb, as if they raided the medicine cabinet in some deleted scene.

In the end, this rather doleful allegory is almost guaranteed to divide opinion, it leaves so many questions hanging in the air. Where M Night Shyamalan's faltering career goes from here is anybody's guess.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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