Rewatch: WFH: The Happening

 2008, My Night Shyamalan (Old) -- Disney

As mentioned during my post about Awake, there is this spate of apocalyptic movies out there, where we get to watch an inexplicable event unfold. Nothing was more inexplicable in Shyamalan's career than doing a movie where the trees are trying to kill people. But even when I first saw it, I got what he was trying to do, in a style only he seems interested in resurrecting these days, a classic slow-paced thoughtful approach to horror most often attributed to Hitchcock. Cinematically, this is still a wonderful movie to see, but now a decade later, oh my, does the acting show through rough shod.

Mark Wahlberg and Zoey Deschanel are a couple going through a rough patch when an event hits the American north east. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the populace begins killing themselves in mass numbers. They are in NYC, and with little coaxing, hop on a train west, to head to a house in the country. If a terrorist bio-attack is happening, then hiding away from the cities should help. But soon it becomes clear that this deadly event is happening everywhere, urban or otherwise.

In a time when impending dread is a trigger for me, I was wondering how I would react (re)watching this movie. Given that the WFH tag forces me to watch in small doses, I was up for it, and also I have seen the movie a few times before. What I was surprised with was not being able to get past the two main characters. I am fine with Wahlberg's acting when he's playing an action hero, but here as a high school science teacher, he is entirely out of his element, not at all believable. And Deschanel's doe eyed stares and whiney lack of emotion quickly gets annoying. I get what Shyamalan was doing with having the event unfold around an incredibly mundane couple already in the middle of their own entirely mundane circumstance, but OMG I was boooooored by them. And that boredom killed the tension for me, for the most part.

The mass casualty, once introduced as the premise, happens entirely in the background. In other movies, this shock appeal would continue throughout, but Shyamalan narrows it down to the people travelling with or encountered by the main couple, until it is whittled down to ... just them. And then, once its determined the event is actually over, we pick up months later, and life just seems to have ... resumed. I guess, like what we are going through now, people who survive an ordeal are just determined to get back into the patterns defined as "normal" no matter what happened.