Today’s quick review: The Happening. As an inexplicable spate of mass suicides spreads across the Northeast, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a science teacher at a Philadelphia high school, flees to rural Pennsylvania with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), his friend Julian (John Leguizamo), and Julian’s daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). As the epidemic spreads even further inland, Elliot must uncover the secret behind the suicides to save the ones he loves.
The Happening is a mystery thriller written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The movie chronicles one group’s attempts to survive a spontaneous outbreak of a neurotoxin that causes humans to kill themselves. The Happening combines a science fiction mystery about the neurotoxin and how it’s spreading with the helplessness and uncertainty of living through an epidemic. However, several major missteps cripple the movie’s attempts at tension.
The Happening’s premise has a core flaw: The rash of suicides is too abstract a threat to be effective. There are no clear rules to the epidemic early on, making it difficult to tell when characters are in danger. Even when the movie pins down how the toxin spreads, there’s no real threat to the characters. The nature of the threat means its victims are either in the clear or already dead, with no tangible menace for them to escape from.
The Happening struggles at a technical level as well. The careful craftsmanship of Shyamalan’s best work is nowhere to be found. The acting is a poor fit for the tone of the movie, with a passive performance from Mark Wahlberg and an unsympathetic one from Zooey Deschanel. The script doesn’t help either, with distracting dialogue at key moments, unjustifiably bad decisions by the characters, and an aimless plot that fixates on an abstract threat.
The end result is a film with very little of its intended tension. With a flawed premise and shaky execution, The Happening is forced to coast on the shock value of its graphic suicides, a macarbe sort of appeal that soon wears off. Horror and thriller fans won’t find much to keep them engaged, while fans of disaster movies and dramas will take issue the movie’s weak plot and characters. Most viewers would be better off skipping it.
That said, The Happening does have the pieces of a good movie jumbled in with its many failures. Its premise dabbles in something terrifying, its plot tries to capture a sense of mystery and desperation, and its cast have all done good work in other contexts. Viewers who are interested in picking apart its ideas, observing where it went wrong, or simply watching a thriller that nears the mark but never hits it will get some value from The Happening.
For a sci-fi thriller from M. Night Shyamalan with a better mystery and more engaging characters, try Signs. For a sci-fi disaster movie with some of the same flavor, try War of the Worlds. For a more action-oriented survival movie with better tension, try I Am Legend or World War Z. For a ground-level perspective at a different world-changing event, check out Arrival.
5.0 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 6.0 for decent ideas tied to poor execution and a difficult premise to sell.