The Happening

Review by Matthew Rodgers

The Happening features a cataclysmic event that was foretold by some and feared by others; an undeniable force of awfulness that is either the end or the wake up call to M. Night Shyalmans career. If you think that’s an over-reaction then go and pay your £10 to see it (as I did because this was only National Press screened a couple of days prior to release) and bear witness to one of the most laughably bad, tension free, poorly acted 91mins in recent memory. And whilst reading this review also keep in mind that it is being written by an M. Night apologist who liked The Lady in the Water. Yes, The Happening is that bad.

When the wind blows on a quiet morning in Central Park the inhabitants stop, mumble incoherent sentences, take a few paces backwards and then find an effective way to commit suicide. At the same time on a downtown construction site workers start voluntarily throwing themselves off the rooftops. And in an upstate high school Mark Wahlberg is teaching (yes, teaching?!?), not rap, but Science in a way that makes you think he has already been affected by the bizarre goings on. What. Is. Happening?

And for those first 15 minutes or so that question of intrigue effectively permeates the story. They are scenes that evoke the very best moments of classic horror, Invasion of the Body Snatchers springs to mind. So grasp those opening chills for all they are worth because what follows is poorly constructed hokum on a level never hinted at in the director’s previous body of work. In fact, watch the Happening without knowing who made the film and there are only a few flashes of genius – John Lequizamos arrival in Princetown provides the only shocks and is grotesquely morbid in execution – that would hint at M. Night.

The tone is all over the place; apparently the director has revealed that he was aiming for B-Movie homage, maybe to cover his bungled tracks? But that still doesn’t explain why Mark Wahlberg speaks his terrible, terrible lines with such a forced earnestness that would feel out of place in a Naked Gun movie, this is the man who re-defined himself with a bravado turn in The Departed and here shares a scene with a domestic houseplant, albeit funny but by then you have laughed so much at some of the unintentionally hilarious scenes that one levelled as comedy falls embarrassingly flat. Zooey Deschanel, an actress also held in kookily high esteem is also truly cringeworthy and sports a kind of bog eyed look of stupidity throughout the entire movie.

But what of the twist? What trick has Shayalaman got up his previously magic sleeve? Absolutely nothing. It’s best that you are made aware that no redemptive factor will arrive late in the day to save this mess of a movie. You are barking up the wrong tree! And it’s with that awful line that the crux of the movie is revealed. It’s the tree’s that are doing it, (hardly a spoiler, it can be worked out in the films opening scenes), releasing a deadly toxin that forces people to lay down in front of moving lawnmowers and gives M. Night his environmental message movie to boot. It also allows him one of the many laughable set-pieces involving a group of survivors running away from……wait for it……the bloody wind.

There is no denying that Shyalaman can be a brilliant director and sometimes writer but maybe its time he got of his preachy pedestal, accepted the criticism like a man rather than crying off to financers who will back such guff as this and start from scratch.