The Happening Will Never Be As Important As The Event Itself

What passes as truth in film is formed around the idea of realism. In drama, theatre and most recently in film making, the “real” is created through various props, actions, dialogue, events and locations that create a world which is based around our perception of it. This verisimilitude is one that is focused upon by film-makers who are intent on disorientating its audience the most. The careful planning and execution of a film which desires to scare us the most are the ones which are most successful in recreating what we are familiar to and what we, as an audience, decide is the “real”. M. Night Shymalan is one such director which has succeeded to do this.

In the past, this success has been forged through confusion caused by metaphorically pulling the wool over the spectators eyes. The twist-endings of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable bore the director, writer and producer an audience whom have been accustomed to the way his films had been structured. As it became so popular, the films of Shymalan were then sold and packaged by the mystery that surrounded what was to come. The arrival of Signs in 2002 saw a new way of thinking for the director who took a premise that could have so easily belonged to Spielberg wrapped in the technical suspense of Hitchcock. Unlike his previous films, Signs failed to provide a claustrophobic atmosphere, thus losing what had made The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable so interesting to watch. The Village, in many ways, was a return to this form and where the film managed to create an understanding between audience and character through atmosphere, critics were not convinced by its twist ending and labelled the director a one-trick pony. This was followed by the equally panned Lady In The Water in 2006 and since there has been minimal attraction to whatever Shymalan would produce next, until now with the release of The Happening.

Where the film-maker and its stars have acknowledged its flaws, they have been too quick to dismiss the film as a B movie, a label which brings connotations of grainy stock and an emphasis on “bad” production values. Where it could be argued that this has been adopted in some of the films attributes, it could also be said that they only manage to increase the effect they have on the audience. The film follows a primary group of actors (Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel) through an event which is happening with no concrete explanation. The deaths of millions of people are blamed chronologically by the media on terrorism and nuclear power plants when finally the protagonists’ reasoning is accepted. However, where it is easy to suggest the film as taking an unreal approach to a very authentic situation, the film-maker opts to providing an open ended answer that tells us that any reasoning that is given for the duration of the films’ timeline could be proved wrong just as quickly as it is proved right. With this style of story-telling, Shymalan manages to keep the suspense and only those willing to accept that the happening is not as important as the event itself, will fully enjoy what he has achieved in the film.