Interesting And Original But Stilted And Confusing Eco-Disaster Thriller

Rating: 6/10 (28 March 2011)

Elliot is a science teacher in New York who decides to go to rural Pennsylvania when an airborne toxin which seems to induce people to commit suicide hits the city. Can he figure out what this mystery threat is and how to avoid falling victim to it ?
This is a slight yet intriguing and intimate disaster movie, but it's unsatisfying because it doesn't answer any of the big questions. Perhaps that's the point - scary things happen for no reason and thwart all efforts to explain them - but the story is too interesting to leave all these details out. Why do people seem to freeze when an attack is coming, why is everyone affected in groups until Mrs Jones at the end, and how exactly do the plants synthesise this previously unidentified chemical ? With material like this it's better to either leave it unexplained (see The Birds) or have a go-for-broke answer (see Invasion Of The Body Snatchers), but Shyamalan treads an uneasy line between both which is ultimately frustrating. It's good fun though, with typically unconventional characters, an unusual bucolic atmosphere which contrasts with the menace, a strong cast, a highly original cello score by James Newton Howard and quality photography throughout by old pro Tak Fujimoto (Badlands, The Silence Of The Lambs). Wahlberg and Leguizamo both eschew their usual tough guy personas to play mild, bespectacled, white-collar Joes and Deschanel is consistently good, although the most interesting performance for me was the totally loopy one by Buckley (the nice gym teacher in Carrie thirty years earlier) as the crazy lady whose traumatic past is subtly alluded to. The movie is sort of a hotch-potch of sci-fi/ecological ideas from the novels of John Wyndham and also reminded me of an old Sidney Sheldon small-town-crazies Twilight Zone story called Need To Know. It's a bit thin for a whole film and doesn't come together but it's still affecting and atmospheric. Trivia - the director has a non-cameo as the creep who keeps calling Deschanel.