Movie Reviews

Zade Rosenthal / 20th Century Fox

Review in a Hurry: You'll see plenty of dead people in M. Night Shyamalan's latest effort, but you may not notice. Nothing in The Happening is particularly lively. 

The Bigger Picture: Fresh off the disastrous Lady in the Water, the bugbear of Shyamalan's new film is something in the air: a mysterious toxin that causes everyone it touches to commit suicide, often in an efficient but spectacularly gory manner. Cue our heroes, a whiny science teacher (Mark Wahlberg) and his spacey wife (Zooey Deschanel), who flee to the countryside in hopes of surviving the outbreak.

The Happening isn't much of a comeback for Shyamalan. More than anything the writer-director seems to have lost the patience that made even flawed projects like The Village watchable. Shyamalan's still trying to take the story seriously—this is, horror of horrors, a message film—but his atypically unmeasured direction is all shock and no awe.

He opts for forced sky-is-falling antics that turn the film's necessary paranoia into downright silliness, with everyone cowering from an invisible enemy in giggle-inducing fashion—a condition that isn't helped by Wahlberg's curiously overwrought performance.

At a slim 91 minutes, The Happening is both rushed and stretched. The film might be shorter because it lacks the writer-director's signature twist at the end. But it could just be the concept, which is too thin to maintain tension for long. Sometimes less can be more, but nothing will always be nothing.

The 180—a Second Opinion: Moving from a reliance on the unseen to more explicit R-rated fare has added a new trick to Shyamalan's bag (now he has two!), which is an interesting step in his development.