Probably the best adaptation of a King story to date...

Rating: Null/10 (2 December 2008)

Major Spoilers:
Frank Darabont's adaptations of Stephen King stories seem to be as successful as Mick Garris's are pedestrian. Here he departs from the prison movie  although there are plenty of imprisoned characters here  to deliver an intelligently written and presented horror film. This is no stalk-and-slash film. There are no cheap scares, and the judicious use of hand-held cameras lend an immediacy and believability to the fantastic story that unfolds. The film is two hours long, but the time flies and, despite some occasionally suspect special effects, the set-pieces really hold you on the edge of your seat. The creatures here are so fantastic and bizarre, the room for invention and imagination so vast, that you just don't know what horrors are going to befall the unlucky shoppers in the small town supermarket suddenly shrouded in a deadly mist.
I read King's novella a long time ago, but it was so entertaining that I still remember it well and, although this film is probably as good an adaptation as it's possible to make, there were a couple of things that didn't quite work for me. Although Marcia Gay Harden is excellent in her role as the religious zealot Mrs Carmody, she is far removed from King's portrayal of the character. If I remember correctly, the character in his novella was old and overweight and wore ugly glasses, while Harden's interpretation is too Hollywood. Give her a makeover and she could dazzle as she sashayed down the red carpet. I think King's idea was that both Mrs Carmody and her outspoken views were mildly grotesque to ordinary people in the 'normal' world, but that grotesqueness is slowly eroded in the minds of her fellow captors as the layers of normality in their world are stripped away by each successive attack from the monsters in the mist.
Secondly, the ending doesn't work for me. There is no ending as such in the novella. We leave Drayton and his new family somewhere on the mist-shrouded road, heading for Bangor, Maine, spurred on by the briefest, dimmest snatch of dialogue heard amidst the static coming from their car radio. The twist ending that Darabont manufactures certainly has its momentary shock value, but once that has passed you start wondering why Drayton is so quick to kill off his fellow travellers. I suppose it is near impossible to end the movie the way the novella ends  at least without a narration from Drayton  but it still rankles a little.
Despite these relatively minor gripes, this is one of the best horror films I've seen in a long time. There aren't many mainstream Hollywood horror flicks that find time for philosophical debate in the midst of all the carnage, but The Mist manages it without the moment sticking out like a sore thumb. It also offers as much to fear from the people inside the supermarket  and the fickle dangers of human nature under stress  as it does from the monstrosities crashing into the supermarket's plate glass windows