I have not had as mixed a reaction towards a film as I have had for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening for quite a long time. If the people in the movie are fighting against some kind of serious force of nature, so do the scenes of Hitchcockian suspense with moments that veer straight into camp. The results are not completely uninteresting and it is far from deserving the scorched-earth reactions the film has already elicited.

The Shyamalan haters would think that this movie is now strike three for him after 2004’s The Village and 2006’s Lady in the Water. I certainly had disdain myself for the former’s nonsensical payoff but, after seeing Lady in the Water, I started to sense a kind of adamantly loopy determination from Shyamalan to just charge ahead no matter the scorn he would receive from people in his storytelling (and there is no denying that movie also had some gaping lapses). That is certainly true with The Happening as well and, though the film is a little too undisciplined to be completely successful, one has got to admire his sheer narcissistic chutzpah as well as his ability to stage a few good scares.

The movie’s concept is certainly an unsettling one and the opening of the movie is quite a jolt. An unseen force is causing people to suddenly become disorientated, lose the ability to speak and then commit suicide in creatively gruesome ways that richly deserve the first R rating Shyamalan has garnered. The fact that it first happens in New York City causes people to think initially that it is a terrorist attack. As the invisible “plague” spreads through other cities in the Northeast, that possibility becomes less and less likely.

We are introduced to Philadelphia high school teacher, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), who is baffled and confused by how all of his school’s classes are being promptly dismissed and evacuated. Since the plague seems to be attacking cities, however, he, his wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and fellow high school teacher, Julian (John Leguizamo) deem it a good idea to leave the city. But the train they get on suddenly stops as it has seemingly lost all communication with nearby train stations.

One would expect the usual mass shouting and hysteria at this point but it is a cliché this movie avoids as Elliot and Alma are entrusted with Julian’s daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) after Julian decides to risk his life to find his wife in the possibly already affected Princeton, NJ. On the other hand, there are a handful of moments that do seem to veer off into camp territory. Deschanel, in particular, acts a little too wide-eyed and childlike at some points (possibly in an effort to break away from her previous deadpan roles) and Wahlberg, in his opening class lecture, goes overboard in his Socratic teaching method of his belief that there are inexplicable phenomena that scientists can only make theories about (though the actors do eventually settle into the parts somewhat as Wahlberg becomes a de-facto leader).

Much of this is probably more intentional by Shyamalan than people give credit for, however, since Shyamalan himself said that this is his attempt at making a “B-movie” of sorts. The fact that he does not go for the obvious doom and gloom, I think, shows that he acknowledges the scenario is truly absurd, especially considering the final explanation of the event. He does not quite find the solid balance in tone between the camp value and the much graver nature of the suicides but it is at least a change of pace from watching the actors just merely be somber all the time and the eventual plunge into hysteria is saved until the very end when Betty Buckley enters as a mad hermit survivalist.