‘I’m talking to a plastic plant. I’m still doing it...’
This is such a difficult film to review because, on the one hand, horror maestro M. Night Shyamalan kind of succeeds in his quest to make a modern-day B-movie in the style of The Blob or the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On the other hand, those films are mostly enjoyable now due to their often unintentional kitschy, camp style. Just as you can’t capture the potent mix of the earnest and the ridiculous that make ’80s action films so enjoyable, you can’t set out to make the kind of film Shyamalan wants to make here. It has to happen by accident. As a result of this, what he has made instead is a truly terrible film on many different levels…
Mark Wahlberg is hideously miscast as science teacher Elliot Moore. Zooey Deschanel is even worse as his wife, Alma. Together, they share zero chemistry. It is literally impossible to believe that these two people would ever be married. They are barely credible as human beings at all. Anyway, when people begin randomly killing themselves en masse, Elliot and Alma must erm… run around in various fields trying to survive? It turns out that it is the plants and trees releasing a deadly toxin that is causing people to malfunction and kill themselves, and if you think that sounds ridiculous, you are absolutely correct. There is also a moment in which Succession‘s Jeremy Strong appears and somehow manages to deliver the worst performance in the whole movie. It’s almost impressive.
This is a monster movie without a monster. The attack sequences are heralded by footage of some trees swaying in the wind. It’s about as menacing as experiencing a slightly offensive smell or stepping in a particularly treacherous puddle. Shyamalan chooses to amp up the absurdity with lots of close-up shots of various characters speaking directly into the camera. I now feel I’ve spent far too much time inspecting Wahlberg’s cavernous nostrils, but at least this provided a distraction from the truly excretable dialogue. While some of the death sequences are pretty haunting, the rest of the film is so ridiculously awful that the effective moments only add insult to injury. We know that this man is capable of being a great filmmaker; there are flashes of it within this very film, so why is the rest of it so appalling?
The Happening is a rare example of a talented director taking loads of risks and absolutely none of them paying off – an absolute disaster.
