M. Night Shyamalan Wrote a Killer Premise, Then Spent the Whole Movie Explaining It

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening opens in Central Park with people killing themselves, and spends the next 90 minutes failing to explain why. That is the whole pitch. It premiered in New York City on June 10, 2008, and 20th Century Fox put it in theaters on June 13. It made $163 million worldwide against a budget of up to $60 million. It also drew negative reviews, with critics hitting the acting, the characters, the writing and the direction.

The gap between those two numbers is the story of this film.

Trailer, via TrailerSource2008.

What Happens, and When

The plot runs on a simple clock. An airborne neurotoxin is the first theory — a bio-terrorist attack, maybe a military weapon released by accident. The deaths spread across the Northeastern United States. High school science teacher Elliot Moore and his wife Alma board a train out of Philadelphia with Elliot’s colleague Julian and Julian’s daughter Jess.

Here is the running order of who dies and where:

Mark Wahlberg plays Elliot. Zooey Deschanel plays Alma. John Leguizamo plays Julian, and Betty Buckley plays Mrs. Jones, the eccentric and paranoid elderly woman the survivors end up with. Ashlyn Sanchez is Jess. Shyamalan voices Joey.

The Nursery Owner’s Theory

The film’s best idea belongs to the nursery owner, played by Frank Collison. He proposes that plant life has developed a defense mechanism against humans — an airborne toxin that stimulates neurotransmitters and makes people kill themselves. It is a genuinely strange, genuinely interesting premise.

Elliot later suggests the nursery owner was right, and adds a twist: the plants target only large groups. So the survivors split into smaller pockets and walk. That is the film’s one real engine, and it produces the film’s one real image — a field of people walking in ones and twos, trying not to be a crowd.

Then Josh and Jared, two teenage boys the trio picks up, are shot and killed by the armed residents of a barricaded house. The film moves past them quickly.

Where the Film Goes Wrong

The premise is a B movie, and the film has drawn reappraisal from viewers who take it as one, as Shyamalan intended. The trouble is that a B movie needs speed and nerve, and The Happening has neither.

Compare what the film sets up against what it delivers:

The acting is the loudest problem. Wahlberg plays a science teacher who cannot sell a single line of science. Deschanel plays a wife with nothing to do but look worried. Leguizamo is gone before the film’s back half, and in this paper’s view he takes much of its energy with him.

Shyamalan’s direction is worse than his script. He stages mass death as a series of tidy, bloodless tableaux, and the effect is not dread. It is indifference. The film keeps telling us something terrible is happening and never once makes us feel it.

What the Reappraisal Gets Right

Some viewers have come back to The Happening as a B movie and found it more fun than the first round of reviews allowed. They have a point about the tropes. The small-town stops, the barricaded house, the paranoid old woman — these are the furniture of cheap genre cinema, and Shyamalan uses them without apology.

But a B movie earns its reputation through conviction, and this one hedges. It wants to be silly and serious at once, and lands on neither. The plant theory is the film’s one good card, and it is played by a man the movie sets aside.

The Happening is 90 minutes long and feels longer. It is not the disaster its reputation suggests, but it is not the cult object its defenders claim either. It is a good premise, a bad script, and a director who stopped trusting his own audience.

2008 films · cult films · M. Night Shyamalan · Mark Wahlberg · movie review · The Happening