M. Night Shyamalan likes to see himself as the Alfred Hitchcock of the modern age and he has given ample evidence that he is worthy of a dignified comparison with the greatest cinematic illusionist and thrills conjurer. Shyamalan, no doubt, has the elusive talent of finding suspense and menace in the silent and the mundane; he is able to pull the rug from under the audience even when they think they are ready for this and expect it. Yet, unlike Hitchcock, he cannot seem to resist the temptation to enter the marshlands of questionable ethical provocations and naive spiritual messages (Signs, The Village) and this disappoints and alienates the people that just want their allotment of good scares.
The Happening, Shyamalan’s new film, is again guilty of making people think when they don’t really want to. It finds true horror in a phantom threat, but when it is revealed many will deem it a trite letdown. This may be the case because it again smacks of understated preaching and people are vehemently blocking this as a matter of defending their intellectual honour. Doubtless, there will be some who will be grateful for the contemplations The Happening provokes, but I fear they will be a negligible minority.
The sinister prologue shows a morning in New York’s Central Park where people start committing inexplicable acts of self-mutilation and suicide. Construction workers jump from high scaffolding, policemen shoot themselves, women stick needles in their necks and a zookeeper offers himself to the lions. The events are blamed on a bio-terrorist attack of some sort, but the truth is that nobody has a clue of what is happening or why. The only certain thing is that with every ominous gust of wind more and more people in the American north-east are afflicted by chillingly diverse suicidal tendencies.
A high-school science teacher in Philadelphia named Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) hears of this and decides to flee the city along with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), his maths teacher friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his eight-year-old daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). They board a train, but it grinds to a halt in the middle of nowhere and Julian abruptly decides to go back and look for his wife. Elliot and Alma are left travelling with his girl through the beautiful Pennsylvanian scapes where they meet other refugees and see dead people around every corner, and while Elliot develops a theory of what is happening he has to deal with family issues that had been brushed under the carpet for far too long.
Despite its kinship to – say – Hitchcock’s Birds or Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, this is a strange type of a disaster film. Shyamalan deserves credit for choosing an unorthodox path for his own scenario about human extinction. The notion of traceless revenge on an inconsiderate and arrogant species that aims violence at itself is as valid as any other, but the bad thing is that many will feel this is dull, not thrilling or simply not cinematic, and the questions it raises will be deemed inappropriate for a cinema, not in a dramatic context anyway. An Inconvenient Truth did the trick, but it had the courtesy of telegraphing its topics to the audience beforehand.
