Morally disturbing

Rating: 7/10 (15 January 2013)

Though everything has been said more or less about the Mist, and its ending, I'd like to have a go at it. I find it disturbing in various respects, which is probably fulfilling the director's intent. More terrifying than gore and monsters is the desecration of a father's promise to his son. The boy is the embodiment of what is sacred to most humans, an innocent being to love and protect at all cost. Killing him for fear he might die of a more horrible kind of death, is a first bitter and deeply unsettling step in the desecration. Realising that this gesture of despair came at the wrong moment, when the boy could have escaped this nightmare and live on, is a twisted irony, a tragedy in which viewers' empathy is being cruelly played with. A wicked fate is making fun of the price the father paid to "protect" his son, the highest and most painful price a parent could possibly pay. For nothing.
But there's more.
I can't help wondering what happened to the folks at the store. It can very well be that they have been liberated by the army, and that that bunch of sordid bigots were on the happy-ending side of the movie. I suspect there is a kind of subtext bringing a most unexpected support to Mrs Carmody's character. As someone pointed out earlier, why does the monster mosquito spare her at the last moment? Why does she die in a graceful kind of ways, almost like a martyr? Why does it feel that her "prophecies" have been fulfilled, that all the lives she claimed during her religious hysteria, have indeed been sacrificed? At the moment fear and tension rise past the fragile boundaries set by reason and civilisation, the movie stages what looks like a straightforward opposition between rationalism and mysticism. Proponents of the latter, confronted with events and creatures beyond their understanding, set out to force a religious explanation on it, as if whatever uncontrollable form of danger to mankind were the manifestation of a heinous god, only to be resolved by submission and sacrifices, in the same backward kind of ways that Mayans in Apocalypto sacrifice local tribes to win their gods' favour. At the opposite, Drayton stands as the embodiment of the hero, the reasonable, courageous and enlightened one. But the ending destroys everything and reverses the values. Destiny spits in the hero's face and seems to side up with the Old Testament worshipping lunatics : the monsters are gone after the sacrifice has been completed. That is even more disturbing. And disgusting.
As a conclusion, I'd say the Mist, literally, is probably a metaphor about the unknown, or about crisis situations, when there are no guidelines anymore, and the human mind is at a loss how to explain and what to do. But also, the mist illustrates the elusive nature of destiny. What will become of us, what is ahead? Choices are prompted by circumstances and assumptions, but nobody can read fate.