The Happening (2008)

 

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Mark Wahlberg as Elliot Moore; Zooey Deschanel as Alma Moore; John Leguizamo as Julian; Ashlyn Sanchez as Jess; Betty Buckley as Mrs. Jones; Spencer Breslin as Josh; Robert Bailey Jr. As Jared

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #223

 

We're packing hot dogs for the road. You know, hot dogs get a bad rep. They gotta cool shape, they got protein.

Spoilers Throughout

As time has passed, his career has been a rollercoaster of other films in his career that have both harmed his reputation and have raised him back in praise to cinema patrons, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening is still in hindsight the film where he had shot himself in the foot. Films before were divisive - with the huge buzz from The Sixth Sense (1999), Shyamalan was pigeonholed for all his films having plot twists, whilst Lady in the Water (2006) was not well received. The Happening however was a film which became notorious, though the irony is that its premise, where plants decide to get their revenge on humanity, is a disturbing one rife in potential. As set up, suddenly waves of people in natural areas like parks are affected by an unknown force. Stopping, becoming disorientated, and leading to mass self-inflicted suicide. The scene, as Shyamalan restrains from showing a great deal barring an occasional shock, where construction workers are suddenly walking off the edge of a tall building they are working on, like how lemmings (fictionally) were meant to, is a legitimately creepy one that in itself sets up a compelling work.

Then, however, Mark Wahlberg is introduced as a science teacher, talking about the bees disappearing and being very heavy handed about environmental issues to his class, and the issue with The Happening and why it became infamous is entirely for me revealed to be the presentation. Yes, some will immediately get annoyed when his character talks about the unknowable science of nature, which would piss material rationalists off, but weaving the supernatural and religion into his work like Signs (2002), Shyamalan was always going to take on the wide eyed mysteries of the world. The issue with the film is that it clearly wanted to juggle a lot, including a knowing sense of humour as Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, the later playing his estranged wife, are meant to the wide eyed ordinary Americans trying to rationalise this grim scenario where mass death happens in the most abrupt of places. The tone misfires, with choices made, that lead the film to its infamy.

The premise itself stretches credibility, even as someone liberal in logic for his storytelling, in that once it is revealed plants are using a pheromone which blocks the human brain function of self preservation, an issue arises where it requires some very elaborate ways for people to kill themselves. It leads to another moment, one of the few perfect ones, of a cop's handgun being passed along in a street between people affected by the happening, but it does stretch into the absurd how abruptly people act, into actual comedy when the elaborate nature of the pheromones' effect include a man starting a drivable lawnmower, laying down and waiting for it to run him over. The story could have just been changed in one way, that the plants admittedly a hallucinogenic that caused chaos, and the premise would be helped. Imagining nature itself attacking humanity is a common theme, and whilst a plant might seem absurd on the surface beyond The Day of the Triffids as a threat, the notion of an entity which covers large amounts of the Earth, and can eventually grow over even manmade structures, is a striking one. Environmental issues are still sadly with us; a film like this, in the era of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), would be perceived as heavy handed, but the concerns this plays with are relevant with the idea of Mother Nature wiping the human species away one we return to in storytelling.

The infamy of the film is that, with the tone a mess, you also have so many misfires. It does want to juggle humour and being serious, which is perfectly possible, but The Happening is a step behind in the pace it needs to succeed in this, where a man having his arms eaten off by lions (as seen in a web video a character watches) is nasty but in position comes off as ridiculous. The dialogue is one of the biggest kneecappings for the film. The speech about the underrated nature of hot dogs, abruptly appearing, is ridiculous. The subplot that, with their marriage in a crucial point, Deschanel's character is hiding the fact she went for dessert with a co-worker, is closer to the awkward humour of a mumblecore comedy, with the rebuttal by Wahlberg about buying cough syrup just to talk to a female stranger being probably the most misfiring, illogical piece of the film. These moments of dialogue are worse knowing it is meant to be humorous and, in cases like the cough syrup, they are meant to build characters teasing each other and moments of levity.

Having characters running away from the wind, which pushes the pheromone, is also inevitably going to look silly, as even the scene of Wahlberg talking to a plastic plant is meant to be playful on purpose, in another rewarding scene of a model house for a building estate full of plastic goods. Confused looking actors running around in a field is inevitably going to look absurd. The worst aspect of this is that, upon reflection, aspects within The Happening itself have aged with some scary resonance, lost within the awash of its misguided aspects. With the attacks only place in one region of the United States, references to conspiracy theories come up in dialogue including the disbelief for some that it was anything else but the government responsible for this. More unfortunately relevant is that, for a sight joke of two older women in ye old gas masks, you also have people arming themselves with guns which leads to probably the most shocking moment (two young children being shot) that really has grown darker over time.

That the film, instead, has visibly slipped trying to juggle so many variables instead maims the film, which eventually does deviate into a pointless conclusion with a strange older woman with huge psychological issues, closer to a prelude to The Visit (2015) by the director. The abruptness of the conclusion, where the events end, fits in the sense of a profoundness of it merely ending, and that it can transpire in another country with ease, but by that point you have a film which is memorable yet for many bad reasons. It is compelling, truthfully, to revisit and a fascinating title which has good and the bad, but I am not surprised that this really did not help its creator with hindsight at all.