By Aniruddha Basu • Jun 14th, 2008 • Filed under: Film Review, Highlights, Hollywood, Movies, featured

Go and watch this movie. You will be surprised at how good it is, writes Aniruddha Basu

Manoj Night Shyamalan is back. After two back to back disappointments with The Village and the almost unwatchable Lady in the Water, the Indian-born director wisely reins in his ego and imagination and makes a controlled and elegant film that plays to all his strengths. The Happening tells the story of a cataclysmic natural event seen through the eyes of a science teacher, his wife and a handful of other survivors.

One fine morning at central park people suddenly tune off, lose their sanity and decide to kill themselves. Initially the mass suicides are regarded as an isolated event. Soon the phenomenon starts spreading across the entire North East. In Philadelphia a science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is hastily interrupted from his lecture (on the extinction of honeybees,) and informed that the situation is escalating and the children must be sent home immediately. The plague has entered their city and people must flee or end up as suicidal zombies. But their plans for rushing to a danger free zone receive a severe jolt when train service abruptly halts in the middle of nowhere and Elliot and a increasingly small gang of survivors are left to fend for themselves against an unseen enemy.

Sounds like a big budget sci-fi adventure, but that is hardly what the director of Signs has in mind. Shyamalan is interested primarily in man’s reaction to a natural crisis beyond his comprehension. To that end The Happening serves as a topical warning, a parable for man’s continued assault on our green planet. It gradually becomes clear that this is not a biological warfare masterminded by terrorists. It is nature getting back at man. First the honeybees disappear. Now people start going mad. And its all happening in luscious green fields, where the trees and grass literally seem to have a life of their own.

At the hands of a lesser director the idea of green vegetation turning malignant might have seemed either preposterous or parodic. Not here. Because Shyamalan understands dread and the power of suggestion better than most directors today. In The Happening the dread is invisible and omnipresent. The menace is in the wind and never has the sight of wind blowing across green fields seemed so eerie. Could it be that the trees are perceiving man as a threat and releasing malignant toxins into the wind that makes people switch off? This idea is suggested time and again, but Shyamalan cleverly stops short of confirming it. Mysterious are the ways of nature.

There are some genuinely creepy moments. Consider the scene when Elliots friend (and fellow teacher) Julian sees bodies hanging by the trees in a quiet village. The suddenness of the event is horrific in itself. Julian’s reaction to it is priceless. He does the only thing he can to preserve sanity in a moment of incomprehensible terror. But it is already too late.

At the beginning of the movie we see construction workers calmly jumping off from the top of a building construction site. Later, footage is shown of lions killing people in a zoo. Shyamalan cleverly cuts away to take the reactions of horrified faces.

Yet for all the terror this is not a horror film. Shyamalan has peopled the movie with quirky eccentric characters trying to deal with a situation simply beyond their control. He does not go for a spectacular apocalyptic finale. Instead the climax is in the remote house of a strange (and very creepy) old lady, who seems as much a threat as the wind outside.

Accentuating the eerie pacing is James Newton Howards terrific music. As with Signs, Howards’ music is subtle and evocative, peaking at just the right places to highlight the tension. In fact, without the music neither movie could have been this effective. And Wahlberg’s performance is another major plus. This actor has incredible range. Could this man, who delivers such a quiet and dignified performance here, have been the volatile wisecracking cop of the Departed?

Allow me to digress a little, The Happening has been widely flanked by critics, a majority of them American. Shyamalan has never been popular with the American press, partly because he comes across as an arrogant loner, defending even his weaker works as masterpieces. He did that with The Village, and even more emphatically with Lady in the Water. And one can only hope that the 38 year old director will temper down with time and learn to look at his films objectively. Unfortunately critics have not lost the opportunity to suggest that Shyamalan’s Indian origins may be a drawback in itself. Consider this review of Signs by a critic on Salon.Com

This film flirts with religiosity more ardently than either “The Sixth Sense” or “Unbreakable,” but finally never gets out of that pop-spirituality territory Shyamalan has made so uniquely his own. It might be a better movie if it did — if we believed that its creator had a specifically Christian or Hindu or Muslim or, I don’t know, Zoroastrian point of view from which to address the Great Questions of Existence. (It may or may not be relevant to observe that Shyamalan himself is a product of two cultures; he was born in India and raised in suburban Philadelphia, where he went to an upscale Episcopalian school.) Instead, we get vague, pseudo-universal nostrums.

Not surprisingly, The Happening has also been judged overtly harshly. But this may prove to be a double edged sword. We at DearCinema thought that most of the criticism was by word of mouth, and will make viewers only more curious.
Go and watch this movie. You will be surprised at how good it is.

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