The Happening

Central Park, New York: A busy weekday morning. The park is filled with men and women on their way to work, parents and kids, joggers and dog walkers. Suddenly everybody stops moving and stands motionless and silent. A girl sitting on a bench hears a scream in the distance. She turns to her friend. A glazed look falls over her eyes. From her hair she draws a long pin, grips it tightly in her hand, holding it hovering over her own throat…

Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) has been pulled into an impromptu teachers' meeting to learn of a terrorist attack sweeping across the East Coast. An airborne virus is spreading quickly, rendering its victims suicidal within minutes. Elliot flees New York with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), accepting an offer from best friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter to stay with a relative in Pennsylvania. However, as they begin their journey things go from bad to worse…

The Happening is the sixth outing for M. Night Shyamalan in the writer/director/producer's chair and he’s back on familiar territory with an apocalyptic threat to America. Shyamalan has a knack for taking the edge off the eeriness of his subject matter with subtle comedy and for the most part The Happening seems to intelligently oscillate between open pastiche and serious horror, mostly due to its obvious allusions to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and other 1950s B-movie fare, with just the faintest whiff of The Day of the Triffids.

Shyamalan has an obvious talent for striking sequences that render a genuine chill to the spine; the creepiness of a city at standstill and the sudden and brutal nature of the suicides are depicted well, and rather than plumping for the popularist ‘terrorist attack’ explanation, as with any Shyamalan script, the plot is about much more than that. The Happening is a creepy and at times downright sinister film which doesn’t rely on the now infamous ‘plot twist’ manoeuvre to generate intrigue.

Laura Potter