M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening concerns a mysterious airborne toxin that renders its victims wobbly and confused before compelling them towards spectacular acts of self-destruction. The movie gives the impression that it was written and directed under the influence of a similar compound.

The Happening is not merely insane in the manner of Lady in the Water — a film that saw its writer/director/godhead cast himself as an unappreciated and soon-to-be martyred genius. It’s also so slackly made it seems like either an extended joke (unlikely considering Shyamalan’s well-documented irony deficiency) or a half-finished product. Perhaps the inevitable M. Night twist is that film we saw at the press screening is entirely different than the one that will be released in theatres on Friday.

I hope that this is not the case, because in its way, The Happening is essential viewing. Like Neil Labute’s Wicker Man remake or Lawrence Kasdan’s Dreamcatcher, its badness exerts a hypnotic fascination. The actors don’t appear to have been directed so much as infected: playing a Pennsylvania couple at the epicenter of a bizarre environmental disaster, Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel give creepily acquiescent, glassy-eyed performances.

It’s hard to hold the film’s failures against the cast, however: Shyamalan’s eco-horror premise is so flimsy that it’s doubtful even the most wide-awake actors could do much to redeem it. Besides, the film isn’t really about the people onscreen. It’s about Shyamalan, his celebrated formal control — now almost entirely eroded by self-consciousness — and his hang-ups.

The ambivalence towards isolation in Signs and The Village has mutated in the wake of Lady in the Water (a film about shutting out reality by retreating into fairy-tale comforts) into a full-on fetish. “We’ve got to get away from other people” cries Wahlberg, having realized that the Earth’s various flora are picking off folks in large groups; “You Deserve This!” reads a sign outside a deserted model home. It’s one of several loudly dropped hints that humanity has only itself to blame for this plant-authored genocide. But nobody deserves a movie like The Happening.
 


 

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