The Happening

The Happening is the latest from M. Night Shyamalan, writer-director of such excellent supernatural-tinged thrillers as The Sixth Sense and Signs, and the less than excellent Lady in the Water and The Village.

It needs to be said upfront that Shyamalan’s work divides audiences, so it’s likely you’ll have to see The Happening and make up your mind for yourself. I know people who have loved the film and others who have hated it. Personally, I didn’t find The Happening appalling but it’s still a very mediocre movie.

Without spoiling the plot, The Happening focuses on a catastrophic “Event” that strikes the American East Coast. Wherever it hits, people die… in some very strange ways. Fleeing inland from this menace is good guy Science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), his aloof wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), good friend and fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo) and Julian’s young daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez).


When you strip away the unusual premise, The Happening is pretty much a derivative Survival Horror flick, vastly inferior to genre predecessors like 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, The Mist and even War of the Worlds.

The Happening’s biggest problem is its complete lack of emotional impact on the audience. The reason that The Sixth Sense and Signs worked was because the audience actually cared about the struggling family units at their centre. You share Toni Collette’s worry about withdrawn Haley Joel Osment. You feel for little Abigail Breslin, crying at the dinner table while Mel Gibson gruffly eats his meal.

By comparison, you don’t care about Elliot and Alma Moore in The Happening at all. Playing these dull, petty leads, Wahlberg and Deschanel have nothing to do but look worried and wide eyed respectively. The only characters who glean any affection from the audience whatsoever are a middle-aged hippie couple with a fondness for hot dogs. And they have minimal screen time.

In fact, any characters who receive the slightest development in The Happening tend to die off-screen or at a distance from the camera, sparing the viewer any emotional trauma.

The Happening certainly has an interesting premise, and the first few deaths are both elegant and genuinely unnerving. However, these methods of dispatch grow increasingly silly – Shyamalan has clearly never seen a lion attack before – and the more you think about it, the more you realise that The Happening is one massive bag of missed opportunities.


Call me sick but I would have liked to have seen children succumbing to the “Event” or at least witnessed its effect at a large social gathering like a church service, or even at a hospital. The Happening could have been far more chilling than the version currently showing in our cinemas, particularly if Shyamalan and the studio had been prepared to push limits, instead of wimping out.

As much as M. Night Shyamalan has been labelled a 21st Century Alfred Hitchcock, The Happening seems to be yet another case of the filmmaker coasting on his reputation instead of actually delivering real thrills. Once again, people lured into the cinema by the promise of a psychologically unnerving experience will be “rewarded” with a very mediocre film.