The Happening (***)

People are going to disagree with me about this M. Night Shyamalan movie, I realize that, but I liked it. They’ll disagree because it has pretty much no ending, more pseudoscience than an astrology textbook, and precious little action. But I still marveled at Shyamalan’s ability to conjure up creepiness out of stillness and silence, out of amber Pennsylvania fields and widescreen Americana. Even the opening, a time-lapse shot of clouds moving against a darkening sky to the James Horner score, is creepy.

In the 1960s, the term “happening” gained currency as a term applied to large gatherings of people for some hip purpose. Here, something is attacking large crowds and turning them into suicidal automatons. The movie’s R rating comes from some of the gruesome ways they off themselves. As for the cause, I won’t give that away, and really, the movie doesn’t either with any degree of specificity, which is one of the things that will probably annoy a lot of people. Let’s just put it this way. Mark Wahlberg is supposed to be a science teacher at “Philadelphia High School,” and in one of the first scenes we see him telling his students that nature is something “beyond our understanding” and that reasons science posits will be “just a theory,” thereby echoing the language creationists use to disparage evolution. At this point I rolled my eyes, and not for the last time. This is a science teacher?

Yet I was enthralled by the way Shyamalan depicts the frightened people trying to figure out what is happening as they fan out from Philly to the countryside, where loonies live. (That’s the director’s apparent opinion, not mine.) Shymalan focuses primarily on the teacher and his googly-eyed wife (Zooey Deschanel), who seem to have grown apart. To Shyamalan, a continental catastrophe is worth years of $150-an-hour counseling. At least he doesn’t (overtly) suggest that it was God’s plan, which just ruined Signs for me (along with lame aliens). Think of this as Signs with an anticlimactic ending instead of a stupid one. I mean, you don’t even get to see how many people die. All that matters is whether one married couple get over their rough patch.

My suspicion that this would be a polarizing movie was confirmed by looking at the IMDB score, which confirmed a higher-than-usual percentage of both 1 and 10 ratings. I admit that the movie is dumber than Britney Spears’s last baby, but the small details and atmosphere made it work for me. Or maybe I was just glad not to be re-watching Shyamalan’s last effort, the godawful fairy tale Lady in the Water. Sometimes these things are just beyond understanding.

IMDB link

viewed 6/14/08; reviewed 6/17/08