The Happening is M Night Shyamalan's attempt at a comeback following the extreme critical and box office failure that was The Lady In The Water. He has chosen, at first glance, a popcorn story and genre in which to stage his revival, but the truth is that many of the faults that sank him are still in evidence.
The Happening in question is a sudden outbreak of mass suicide. The film opens with some of the creepiest sequences for a long time with ordinary folks taking knitting needles to the neck, walking off buildings under construction and shooting themeselves in a line with a police officer's sidearm. News spreads that it might be a terrorist attack and city dwellers take to the hills in their millions. It then becomes clear that this is no terrorist attack and that the countryside is the single worst place to be.
All of this sounds like a gripping little horror adaptation, perhaps something by Stephen King (similarities to the writer's The Stand and most especially his more recent Cell are marked) and for much of the film it is. Whilst we follow Mark Wahlberg's everyman teacher and his small family in their race away from the city and watch humanity falling apart around them there is a sense of fear and oppression that works very well.
Then the reason behind the events starts to kick in and much of the atmosphere dissipates. This is partly because it seems ridiculous, but more because it is hammered home with all the subtlety of a bulldozer at full speed. Nature's under attack, it's our fault and we will destroy ourselves, one way or another. Man is not fit to survive and will feed on each other as civilisation is destroyed. What causes the fall of civilisation is unimportant because we'll finish the job no matter what it is. This is not just the underpinning of the plot, but rather a polemic rant by Shyamalan about the state of the planet and our place within it. We came to see a scary horror film, not to hear an environmentalist lecture.
The cast struggle mightily with all of this, turning in performances that can be called, at best, indifferent. Some of the dialogue is cringe-makingly awful and the plot is episodic and builds up to a finale that just doesn't happen. The twist is not that there isn't a twist - it's that there isn't an ending.
The suicide scenes of The Happening will remain in the memory long after you see it, but the rest of the film will be forgotten long before you've made it out of the cinema doors.
M Night Shyamalan's comeback needs some more work.