Directed by:
M. Night ShyamalanScreenplay:
M. Night ShyamalanCinematography:
Tak FujimotoComposer:
James Newton HowardCast:
Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Ashlyn Sanchez, Betty Buckley, Spencer Breslin, Frank Collison, Jeremy Strong, Alan Ruck, M. Night Shyamalan (more)VOD (2)
Plots(1)
The film opens onto New York City's Central Park with a crowd of people enjoying an idyllic summer day. The carefree scene soon takes a terrifying turn, when out of nowhere, hordes of people begin to commit suicide en masse. Cut to Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), a science teacher in Philadelphia. When he learns of the attack on New York, he meets up with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), his friend Julian (John Leguizamo), and Julians's daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). They make plans to get out of the city via train, but the train is evacuated in the middle of a small Pennsylvania town. (20th Century Fox)
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Reviews (12)
An ordinary, straightforward, and boring film. And if it wasn’t for the big creaking house with a strange landlady, I wouldn't have even known that it was made by a master of tension and brilliant twists, and the fact that Shyamalan isn't afraid to show the "action" directly this time and doesn't shy away from the camera doesn't suggest this either. So, we have several truly interesting and bloody accidents that are striking and real enough to captivate (construction site, car, combine harvester), but the atmosphere is nonexistent. There are a lot of unnecessary peripheral that make it impossible for the plot to thicken and work on the tension. And the final twist isn’t surprising, either, it was expected considering the name of the director.
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Except for Marky Mark’s somewhat odd performance and my expectation of a more powerful moral than just that people are mostly a bunch of scumbags who deserve to die (btw our Slovak brothers' title ‘Event’, is a catchier than the Czech ‘It Happened’) I quite liked it. The opening scenes, especially the one with the flying workers, are flawless and people behave wonderfully freakishly. Zooey Deschanel was fantastic as was John Leguisam's mathematician. Shy the director still knows how to make a movie. He can create the right atmosphere and so on, but Shy the screenwriter should take a break for a while. Wait for better ideas and prepare a big comeback. Too bad he didn't have a jab at Potter.
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It’s a pity that the wind didn’t also engulf Václav Klaus, at least Shymalan's ecological agitprop would have had some useful effect. Now, seriously, Shyamalan hasn't lost his directorial skill and he can still make scenes that give you chills, but the problem here is in two things: the half-baked concept, where logic takes a vacation quite often, and then the leading duo. Mark Wahlberg, as much as I like him, is absolutely unsuited to the role of a high school biology professor and bumbling husband (Mark's pissed-off macho characters are best with a gun in his hand) and whenever he tries to play some serious emotion and speaks up, he ruins all the action on screen with his perpetually furrowed brow and unbelievable speech. Mark, sorry, this didn't work out (and now I’m afraid of Jackson's The Lovely Bones). And Zooey, that doll with big eyes, gives it an even bigger punch. So Shyamalan lost with the casting and the half-baked script, but I'm still a fan.
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The only question I have in connection with this film relates to the budget. I’d even suspect Shyamalan of preferring to embezzle a little something into his own pocket as if he suspected that his latest venture (as is slowly becoming his habit) wouldn't even make money. But now more seriously: I was not at all disappointed because this is exactly the kind of intimate thriller I was expecting. Shyamalan plunges ordinary characters into a marginal situation that cannot be properly rationally explained, leaving them groping not only over the question of mysterious deaths but also over their own relationships. These relationships are stressed in the extreme, even if some of the dialogue suffers from "romantic B-movie" syndrome. It's not about bogeymen, it's about questions we need to start asking. PS: At times, Shyamalan and his cinematographer Fujimoto did such great work that I thought about how good it would be if he had made Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
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We get a climax, the story moves forward along a path lined with tension, and the actors guide us through this depressing world with such ease that the hour and a half flies by almost on its own. So why am I staring at ultra-low ratings and reviews that constantly repeat borrowed complaints from reviews about the lack of a climax and total boredom? The Happening is now the third film in a row from M. Night Shyamalan that the public expects to combine The Sixth Sense and Signs and end up with a similarly nerve-wracking affair like those two. And as a result of these expectations, a harsh impact comes. I can understand this mistake with The Village, which I still consider one of the best films of my life, but with the excellent Lady in the Water, I understand it less, but if someone can't learn even on their third try, so be it. Perhaps it would be good to go to the cinema without prejudices and false expectations, and reconciling with the unpredictable Indian master will be on the agenda again.
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Gallery (122)
Photo © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation
![The Happening - Photos](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/photos/160/817/160817892_09a686.jpg)
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