Crafting dread from things unseen

Rating: 6/10 (14 June 2008)

You've heard the saying "the more things change, the more they stay the same"? Well, nothing better describes the critical reception surrounding M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening. For better or worse, Shyamalan has once again stuck to his artistic vision and produced yet another cerebral skin crawler, only to see vast numbers of critics go apoplectic as a result.
The Happening unfolds quickly, over the span of a single day, beginning in New York City. All over town, starting in Central Park, people begin succumbing to a bizarre, trance-like state in which they engineer their own deaths in robotic fashion. The viewer, like the protagonists in the film, is left in the dark, forced to either buy into the film's various theories bantered as to why this is happening, or draw their own conclusions. Is it airborne? Has a terrorist cell spiked the water supply with a new neurotoxin? Is humanity the subject of an unexplained die-off akin to that decimating the honey bee population? Shyamalan refuses to provide pat answers. Even after high-school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) concludes (as best he can) that the catalyst is a mysterious heretofore unknown airborne agent released by plant life  something akin to the oceanic red tide algae blooms that kill all marine life in their path  we still never know for sure.
Because of interviews Shyamalan has given as part of his pre-publicity for the movie, some critics have gone out on a limb and interpreted the film's message as an ode to Intelligent Design writ large, but doing so is really a stretch. While Shyamalan may have committed the unforgivable sin of going on record as somebody in Hollywood who actually holds to a belief system whose focus is other than Scientology or powder that can be sucked up through one's nasal cavities, so much in The Happening is left up to pure speculation that one could easily read just about anything into it. Evolution taking a nasty and rapid turn? The Great Spirit waking up on the wrong side of the bed? Mother Nature deciding it's not nice to fool her (as a margarine ad once expounded)? The honey bee syndrome? Take your pick.
What is undeniable, however, is Shyamalan's ability to wring dread out of a simple gust of wind, the coming together of large groups of people, even the lonely quivering of a plastic plant. His talent is reminiscent of Hitchcock, even if his stories are a tad too high concept for a lot of folks, including himself at times.
Is The Happening a perfect film? No. It suffers from uneven acting (largely by the stupendously dopey-eyed Zooey Deschanel) and moments of unnecessarily quirky and awkward dialog, but it is a significant bounce back from 2006's tepid Lady in the Water, and it most definitely is a movie that will give you cause to think about things, which, I can safely say, is more than what 99% of this summer's blockbusters will achieve.