Hitchcock meets Twilight Zone meets CIA casebook

Rating: Null/10 (3 September 2008)

Baffling: across the east coast of the United States, large groups of people have mysteriously begun killing themselves. It is initially believed that a foreign "terrorist group" has released a chemical agent into the atmosphere, but as "The Happening" progresses it becomes apparent that the "terrorist" in question is really Mother Nature herself. Earth's trees and forests, we learn, have become sensitive to human activity, and so have now begun releasing "suicide inducing toxins" as a form of self defence. Large groups of people set off the attacks, and so humans must travel in small groups so as to avoid triggering nature's newly evolved defence mechanism.
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, "The Happening" can be read through at least three prisms. On one hand it's part of a series of post 9/11 disaster movies ("War of the Worlds", "Mist", "Cloverfield"), but is atypical in the way its political allegory pushes further than its siblings. Whereas your typical post 9/11 monster movie watches as hapless whites are stomped on by faceless bogeymen - terrorists which these films always demonize - "The Happening" deals with what military tacticians typically call "blow-back" (violence directed at the civilian population of aggressor governments). Here, Americans are literally set upon by "terrorist suicide bombers" because they indiscriminately, and egotistically, "trample on territory that does not belong to them". Overlap Shyamalan's foliage with the West's recent Middle Eastern Crusades, and you have a clear message; the trees want payback.
Shunt aside power-politics and "The Happening" is also part of a recent chain of either environmentally conscious films or films which posit Nature as a cruel asphyxiator ("Wall-E", "Avatar", "AntiChrist", "The Happening", "An Inconvenient Truth", "Grizzly Man", "Into The Wild", "Deamland", "The Day The Earth Stood Still", "The Day After Tomorrow", "Happy Feet" etc). While all these films mean well, it's disconcerting to see how quickly and efficiently our fears are transfered from one thing to another. From "fascist" Germans, to yellow invasions, to "communist" Russians, to Middle Eastern "terrorists" and now to the environment itself, an unseen enemy is always created to keep populaces in a state of fear. This fear is then used to enforce restrictions, unifying men by threatening their very survival. But now we have the perfect bogeyman, the perfect scapegoat, ubiquitous, perpetual and all-encompassing. Environmentalism is not just about hugging trees. It's a political project, a full-bodied ideology that presents itself in terms of progress and aspiration. But this ideology is built on the idea of a collective threat that makes "security" its basic principle, making "the struggle for survival" the central aim of our social and political life.
The outcomes of all this environmental fear mongering will probably reveal itself in a couple decades. While such lines of discussion encourage us to realise that there are always consequences to capitalist relations - the demands of capitalism being inherently unsustainable and downright apocalyptic - the real trend seems to be toward outright denial (we hurt the environment more, the MORE we're aware of our actions), toward darker, more insidious mechanisms of control, and toward a "monetising" of environmentalism; a shallow green capitalism, where green initiatives are used to squeeze but more profits, and where "clean" wind energy on one side of the world is powered by the toxic mining for magnetic metals in China. Build a wind turbine and you kill two hundred people and render a square mile toxic and uninhabitable for 20 years. But hey, you make a buck.
Shyamalan's "Signs" was one of the best recent alien invasion movies, if you can overlook its absolutely distasteful "religious subplot". Night's a die-hard Christian, and so it's also possible to view "The Happening" as another fundamentalist tract (sinners punished by a vengeful God/Nature?), though such a reading is so thin as to be pointless.
Beyond all this the film works well as an amalgamation of pulpy science fiction, "Twilight Zone" episodes and Alfred Hitchcock (specifically "Birds", "Psycho", "Frenzy" and "Marnie"). Like Hitchcock, Shyamalan knows how to elevate pulp, how to imbue pulp with his own concerns (for better or for worse), and more importantly, how to toy with his audience with but the simplest of tools. And like Hitch, Shyamalan's shot selection is super fine-tuned, restrained and precise, every camera move, composition, angle, motion and sequence impeccably planned. Both directors also offer a masterclass in how to classically build thrills, and neither goes for elaborate special effects or fast cutting. Shyamalan's scores also often reference Bernard Herrmann, a composer oft associated with Hitch, and like the Master, has a penchant for on-screen, walk-on cameos.
8.5/10 - A nice throwback to 1950s science fiction. There's also something audacious about Shyamalan's insistence on making a film in which trees are the "monsters". It's a difficult premise to pull off. Worth two viewings.