The Happening is actually pretty good, but Shyamalan still can’t write.
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Notable Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Ashlyn Sanchez, Betty Buckley, Spencer Breslin, Robert Bailey Jr.
Ideally, M. Night Shyamalan’s next release will only credit him as producer and director. It seems no matter how great he is in both of those positions (and make no mistakes, he is amazing at both) he is still a terrible writer. Everything about The Happening is eerie, scary, and sometimes even terrifying in all the right ways. The look, feel, and execution are perfect, but Shyamalan’s ideas are so weak. His central themes are great, but he fumbles around with the little details of story. It is no longer a question of whether or not Shyamalan can make a scary movie, but can he convey to the audience why they should be scared?
He seems to believe he can in his first R-rated outing. But instead of taking advantage of his freedom to make a more mature horror flick, he uses the R rating to justify the use of shocking, irrational violence. The death scenes in The Happening are, admittedly, disturbing, but the fact remains that Shyamalan lacks the ability to put any true substance behind his imagery. It’s like science teacher, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) says: you can’t get by on good looks alone.
However, The Happening is the closet Shyamalan has come to doing so. In more innocent times his story about plants adapting in order to protect themselves from a world overrun by humanity would be beautiful in its simplicity. But the happening in The Happening goes unexplained which would be great if the idea was not so hokey and the reasoning was not so childish. The happening happens because it happens. Presumably there is a reason to fear something so random and uncontrollable, but why bother fearing something that materializes without warning and vanishes just as quickly?
The things Shyamalan wants people to be afraid of are on par with fearing that gravity might stop working or that an individual might spontaneously combust. Sure, it might happen, but there is no time to be afraid of something so unlikely when there are much more immediate threats in our everyday lives. Obviously Shyamalan is trying to be timely with his subject matter, but again his writing renders his heavy-handed topic null and void. No one should be scared just because someone tells them to be.
We find ourselves back at the beginning of the argument which is what is so infuriating about Shyamalan’s work in the first place. His talent behind the camera and as a producer is inarguable; he once said he wanted to be the next Hitchcock and to some degree he is, but it is worth mentioning that much of Hitchcock’s best work was written by someone else. Like Hitchcock, Shyamalan has a knack for inserting horror and suspense into ordinary things and everyday situations. The tension in The Happening is almost unbearable until one remembers that mankind is being attacked by killer trees. Psychotic photosynthesis! Run!
Yet Shyamalan’s skills are such that he is able to wring every last drop of terror out of his see-through plot. Imagine the kind of fright he could give audiences with a competent writer at the helm. Shyamalan has finally ditched the obligatory twist ending, next he needs to try his hand at directing someone else’s material. Perhaps then he can offer us all something to truly be afraid of.
