The Happening

Thriller director M. Night Shyamalan's film output has been disappointingly subject to the law of diminishing returns.

The Sixth Sense raised the bar for unsettling, supernatural chillers, Unbreakable repeated the creepy trick and then Signs, The Village and Lady in the Water all packed incrementally lesser punches.

They were about as frightening as your gran hiding behind the bedroom door.

This goes some way to redressing the balance - few directors can orchestrate a psychologically debilitating shock setpiece like Shyamalan: he sees dead people better than most shock merchants.

Yet it hangs together uneasily. What kicks off splendidly as a heartstopping, out-and-out chiller hangs a left into awkward, comedy territory only for it to swing back to full-on mindnumbing dread. And then back again.

The opening scene is the master firing on all cylinders. As a light breeze drifts through Central Park, breakfast walkers stop in their tracks. And then start killing themselves.

One never-shredding sequence shows construction workers serenely walking off scaffolding walkways to fall to their deaths below. Similarities to the World Trade Center "jumpers" are terrifyingly unavoidable.

Across town, science teacher Elliot Moore (Wahlberg) gathers up his wife Alma (Deschanel) and they head off by rail together with his buddy Julian (Leguizamo) and his daughter.

However, after the train halts in a remote Pennsylvania backwater it becomes apparent that "the event" which struck New York is targeting even the smallest rural community.

There's a lot of promise here. Shyamalan admirably attempts to flesh out Elliot and Alma's troubled relationship...but this takes the form of a comedy routine which sits ill with grim scenes of roadsweepers hanging from trees or wannabe suicides opting for death-by-lawnmower.

And it's not a decent laugh-inducing skit. The director's mirthless dialogue is the sort of script fashioned by someone with no sense of humour. Or intentional sense of humour.

So we're left with two movies in one. There's a potentially gripping War of the Worlds-style psychological scenario. And then there's a comedy that would tax the sort of people who find My Family challenging.

Ultimately, you (sixth) sense that Shyamalan's lost the plot.

Tim Evans

Check out the Movies With A Twist feature right here!