Movie Review: The Happening

The Happening is a concept in search of a storyline. It might very well have been a Sci Fi Channel special, tucked away among Sabertooths Attack! and Mansquito on the same channel that gave us the M. Night Shyamalan con job (The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan) last time he had a movie coming out. This is tragic, because it succeeds in ways that would have been above average for a run of the mill B movie director, and yet is many notches below what we know M. Night is capable of.

All the same, the exegesis of the subprime crisis, post-9/11 revisionism, and a million ways to kill yourself combine to produce an intensely unsettling look at 21st century America. The director's reiteration of the unknowable nature of wonders is to be expected - the signs don't explain the happenings, as it were. It is this expectedness of the unexpected that is the problem with M. Night's recent films - it gives us a Brody-view of Kafka, rather than allowing us to experience the unknown for what it is. Dumbing down the material might be appropriate for the mainstream, but when popular culture is so much more challenging and complex, and so are the audiences - life imitating art, or vice versa - the creative artist must rise to the challenge and set ever greater imponderables in our path, not proffer the facile "there are forces at work beyond our understanding" thesis.

The shock value of the film plays on both usual disaster movie themes and classic American Paranoid styles. It becomes hard to distinguish between a neurological infection and fear of the stranger. Post the Green Revolution, it is not hard to imagine the plants might feel the same way, having had enough nitrogenous fertilizer for a decade.

The science teacher turned survivalist is beset by too many issues, rocky marriage notwithstanding. He doesn't get to go on a Resident Evil style rampage, the crisis peaking and tapering off. Life then inexplicably returns to normal, although the plant menace doesn't go away for good.

Neither will M. Night. Give him a year or so and he'll be back with another predictable tale of warnings ignored, dark events, and strange happenings.