I loved the Sixth Sense. So much so that it really bugs me how people feel that it is now acceptable to give away the ending. It has become a joke now, which is a shame because it means that anyone who hasn't seen it yet has probably already lost their chance to enjoy it as the director intended. The director, of course, was the newcomer M Night Shyamalan. Everyone was stunned by the fantastic work from this unknown writer/director, who later went on to bring us the under-rated Unbreakable. Then we went off the rails a bit with Signs and continued his downward spiral with The Village and Lady In The Water.
Now he is back with The Happening, which feels like a cross between a Seventies horror film and an earnest discussion with a drunken hippy. It opens with an incident in Central Park. Hundreds of New Yorkers are going about their business when, suddenly, they stop moving. Then they start to kill themselves. Pretty soon we are introduced to Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a high school science teacher. You can tell he is a clever chap because his ears prick up when he hears the news announcing a terrorist attack in Central Park. "Central Park?" he says, "That's odd." He doesn't say why he thinks it's strange. In fact, I think it makes sense for terrorists to attack such a well known public location. But it raises warning flags for Elliot, so it's supposed to raise flags for us, too.
Except, of course, it's not terrorists. The audience soon works out that it's the trees that are causing the calamity. We know this because the trees mysteriously sway with an unexplained wind just before the people bump themselves off. We also know this because the characters keep banging on about humans are being mean to the planet. In principle there's nothing wrong with films having a political message, but this seems heavy-handed and clunking.
Eventually, Elliot and his family decide to escape the threat by moving to the countryside but, other than the mild horror of the regular suicides and the question of whether the hero will still have a wife at the end of it all, there is not much to hold the attention. There is a lot of signposting, too. At one point a bonkers hermit woman starts rabbiting on about a pipe that runs between her house and an outhouse. She does this for no reason, except that we know it is bound to be important in the final scenes. The finale, while presumably intended to be chilling, is actually laughable.
The Happening will do nothing to rescue M Night's reputation as a fading force.
Mr P's rating: 4/10
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