It is not until the third act, as the three protagonists arrive at the isolated house of the hermit Mrs. In the foregrund: science teacher Elliot Moore ( Mark Wahlberg), Jess ( Ashlyn Sanchez), the daughter of his best friend, and his wife Alma ( Zooey Deschanel). Watching The Happening is like being trapped inside the mind of Kevin Wendell Crumb of Split and Glass: two split identities, one delivering suicide scenes of an unflinching nature as well as other intermittent moments of resonance, and another identity insisting on interrupting the program with quirky humour, kooky characters, vague personal conflicts, nebulous character motivations, and at times inexplicable behaviour. What we get instead, after a tolerably engaging classroom scene, is a gradual, almost systematic dismantling of everything that made the first two incidents distinctive, infectious cinema. You would now expect the sort of masterpiece that mainstream American cinema can give us: a highly dramatic story, staged with such elegance, invention and impact as to lift it up to a plane of great resonance. The next scene employs a louder, direct shock approach to a still satisfying effect: at a construction site workers start to jump off a tall building in a mass self-extinction event. Night Shyamalan took a more subtle, creepier route to a similar destination. Where David Fincher played on suddenness and shock effect, however, M. The existentially panic-inducing vision of normality switched to nightmare reminded me of a scene I saw a year before, in Zodiac, where the couple at the lakeshore are set upon by the killer in a beekeeper costume, announcing their demise in a stentorian voice of the cruellest kind. I vividly remember the icily electrifying effect of the opening scene of The Happening, a stroke of genius in its merciless, methodical stripping away of our humanity, into machines of flesh whose prime directive was to terminate ourselves. All the articles can also be accessed through this overview, which also contains statistical information and links to external articles. An article on The Visit (2015) is upcoming.
This is the third article on The Happening (2008), the first two are here and here. There are several articles on each work: The Sixth Sense (1999, here, here and here), Unbreakable (2000, here, here and here), Signs (2002, here, here, here and here), The Village (2004, here, here and here), Lady in the Water (2006, here and here), The Last Airbender (2010, here and here), After Earth (2013, here and here), Split (2016, here, here and here), and an initial reaction to Glass (2019). The author is behind an analysis project about M.
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