The Happening

Sat, Jun 14 03:27 AM

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Zoey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley

Director: M Night Shyamalan

Maybe Shyamalan let the criticism get to him, or the expectations. For, The Happening - at a budget of $57 million, the most high-profile Asian film co-production with a US studio - feels nothing like a Shyamalan film.

Often criticised for repeating the same tricks, including using a child, an action star in a non-action part, a supernatural occurrence and a twist ending, he more or less sticks to the script but plays it disappointingly straight and safe. So much so that the horror never gets to you and the "twist" seems contrived.

The worst part is the dialogus. Everything is spelt and talked out here, from the swaying of trees conveying the coming of death to people repeatedly saying how scared they are. Talking about The Happening, Shyamalan had said: "The emotional centre of the movie is if you knew you were going to die... what would your conversation be like?" However, the couple in question here - Elliot (Wahlberg) and Alma (Deschanel) - never have that conversation. What they exchange are memories lifted off a Hallmark card, or a cheesy Hollywood romance.

The film starts off beautifully, with a pleasant morning in Central Park, New York City, quickly turning into a nightmare. A woman kills herself with a hairpin and, next, people are walking to their deaths off a building under construction. The horror in the face of a worker as he looks up to see that sight is never replicated.

The scene shifts to Philadelphia where Elliot is a popular science teacher at school. Hearing about the New York events, the school is shut down for fear of a terror attack. Elliot decides to leave with his wife to a friend's mother's place in the countryside, which is expected to be safe.

However, even while they are on the train making their way out of Philadelphia, the horror is spreading out of New York to the entire North-East Coast.

Perhaps that's the problem here. Though The Happening's cinematography unfailingly sets the mood, Shyamalan flops in establishing mass hysteria; his crowds just stopping short of real fear. Only when he keeps it small, like a woman talking to her daughter who is just about to kill herself, or when a man looks up to see a tear in his jeep's top and realises that all is lost, does the horror come across.

Or when Elliot and Alma, along with a small girl, take refuge in a lonely house of a strange old woman, Mrs Jones. You know that the source of the horror is something else, but Buckley as Jones gives you the shivers.

In hinting at the reason for what's happening quite early on - which is a slightly twisted interpretation of nature hitting back at mankind - Shyamalan takes away a large part of the thrill of anticipation.

It doesn't help that Wahlberg looks neither vulnerable, nor very involved - rather too confident of getting through the crisis, in the mould of a real action hero. As for Deschanel, what can one say? Except that the director perhaps was bowled over by her translucent blue eyes which, spread wide in fear, are an arresting sight in themselves. Otherwise, though she insists she is scared, she seems to be mightily pleased. Perhaps as surprised as us at finding herself in this film.

The cheapest trick is to have Elliot tell his class about honeybees dying mysteriously, followed by a shot of what he has written on the blackboard: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live" - Albert Einstein. The trouble is that there is no proof Einstein ever said that. And Shyamalan perhaps knows it.

The writer-director has described The Happening as his scariest movie. The Shyamalan we know would know that, sometimes, it is better to leave things unsaid.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com

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