Frank Darabont wrote and directed The Mist, and the film wants you to believe it is about monsters. It is not. The creatures that come out of the fog are the least interesting thing in it. The Mist is about what happens when a group of people lock themselves in a grocery store and discover they cannot stand each other. That is the real horror, and it is where the film earns its keep.
Trailer, via DimensionFilms.
A Storm Over Bridgton, Maine
The setup is simple. A severe thunderstorm hits Bridgton, Maine, and a tree crashes through the lakeside home of David Drayton, his wife Stephanie, and their eight-year-old son, Billy. The next morning, a thick mist rolls across the lake. David and Billy head into town with their neighbor Brent Norton to buy supplies. On the way, they pass military convoys. Inside the supermarket, police cars speed past. Then Dan Miller runs in warning of something in the mist, a civil alert siren sounds, and managers Ollie Weeks and Bud Brown seal the doors.
From there, The Mist becomes a siege picture. The store is the whole world, and the people in it are the threat.
The Tentacle, the Insects, the Pterodactyls
The monster work is uneven. Bagger Norm ignores David’s advice and goes out to fix the emergency generator. A tentacled creature grabs him and drags him into the mist. That is the film’s first real kill, and it lands. Later, enormous flying insects swarm the lit windows and pterodactyl-like predators hunt them. One predator smashes a window and both species get inside. In the panic, two people die and another suffers fatal burns trying to burn the insects out.
The creatures are Lovecraftian, and the film knows it. But the effects do not always hold up. Some of the mist work is thin, and the flying things read as dated. The film is 126 minutes, and the middle stretch sags under its own monster-of-the-week logic.
What works better is the cast. Thomas Jane plays David with a flat, tired decency. Laurie Holden is Amanda Dunfrey, one of two teachers who clash with the store’s resident prophet. Toby Jones is Ollie Weeks, a former regional shooting champion who turns out to be the most competent person in the building. Andre Braugher plays Brent Norton, the skeptic who walks out with a group and does not come back. Marcia Gay Harden plays Mrs. Carmody, and she is the film’s engine.
Mrs. Carmody and the Case for Staying Inside
Carmody is a religious fanatic who preaches that the mist is divine punishment. She is not wrong that something is out there. She is wrong about what it means, and Harden plays her with a certainty that curdles into something worse. The film’s best scenes are not the creature attacks. They are the arguments.
Amanda carries a revolver in her purse and gives it to Ollie. That detail matters. The Mist is a film about who gets to hold the gun and who gets to decide what the group believes. The teachers, Amanda and Irene Reppler, played by Frances Sternhagen, fight Carmody over her religious reading of the disaster. Those fights are the film’s spine.
The cast is deep, and the film uses it. Jane and Holden anchor the middle. Jones gets the film’s driest lines as the man who can actually shoot. Braugher gives Brent a stubborn dignity before he walks out the door. William Sadler, Jeffrey DeMunn, Sam Witwer, Alexa Davalos, Nathan Gamble and Chris Owen fill out the store.
That is an ensemble doing ensemble work, and it is the reason the film holds together at all.
The Ending Darabont Changed
Darabont changed the ending from Stephen King’s 1980 novella, and King praised the change. King said people who spoil the film’s ending should be “hung by the neck until dead.” That is a strong endorsement from the source author, and it tells you the ending is the point.
The film was shot in Shreveport, Louisiana, starting in February 2007. It premiered at ShowEast on October 18, 2007, and opened in the United States on November 21, 2007, through Dimension Films via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with The Weinstein Company handling international markets. It grossed $57.3 million against a $13–18 million budget. Critics were generally positive.
What the Film Gets Right, and What It Does Not
- Title: The Mist (2007)
- Director and writer: Frank Darabont
- Runtime: 126 minutes
- Genres: Horror, Science Fiction, Thriller
- Tagline: “Fear changes everything.”
- Based on: Stephen King’s 1980 novella
- Budget: $13–18 million
- Gross: $57.3 million
- Metacritic: 58/100
- Score: 5.8/10
The Mist is a monster movie that keeps trying to be a movie about people. When it remembers that, it is sharp. The store is a pressure cooker, and the film understands that the scariest thing in the room is the person who has decided the disaster proves them right. Carmody is not a cartoon. She is a woman with a following, and the film shows you how she gets one.
The problem is the middle. The creature set pieces are loud and long, and they do not build. The tentacle kill is good. The insect swarm is good. The pterodactyls are not. By the time the film reaches its final act, the monsters have worn out their welcome, and the human story has to carry everything. It mostly does, but the drag is real.
The film also has a tone problem. It wants to be a B-movie creature feature and a serious study of panic at the same time. Sometimes those two things sit together. Sometimes they fight. The Mist is at its best when it stops pretending the creatures are the point and lets the cast tear into each other.
The Mist is a good film trapped inside an uneven one. The cast is excellent, the premise is airtight, and the ending is the kind of swing that most horror films are too scared to take. But the middle is bloated, the effects are hit-or-miss, and the film never fully commits to being the psychological horror it clearly wants to be. It is worth watching for Harden, Jones, and the last twenty minutes. It is not worth watching for the bugs.
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