There’s not that much left to say about the meteoric rise and thunderous crash of the career of M. Night Shyamalan, but one thing is more certain: Hollywood always loves a comeback story. So the question is: does The Happening constitute a comeback? Well, I don’t think I’d go that far, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Shyamalan manages to construct, for the most part, an effective paranoid thriller although it does delve into some inappropriate bouts of comedy and melodrama. On the bright side though, it’s infinitely more cohesive than Lady in the Water and not as insulting as The Village.

It starts in Central Park where people out minding their own business mysteriously become inflicted with a condition that makes them disorientated, lose their motor functions and eventually kill themselves. Science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) flee Philadelphia with Elliot’s friend Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). However, it soon becomes apparent that the phenomenon isn’t limited to either Central Park or New York City and the “attack” is spreading from the largest population centres to the smaller ones. It’s a desperate quest for survival as Elliot and Alma try and stay one step ahead of the happening.

Like all of Shyamalan’s films, The Happening takes place in hyper-realistic and visceral reality, like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, which either works or it doesn’t. In this movie we see both sides, but what works best is when Shyamalan ratchets up the tension and then the movie rightful begins to feel like a worthy successor to Hitchcock’s The Birds, which was clearly the primary influence for Happening.

The underling fear generated in the film comes from the characters feeling that they have no idea what’s going on, and thus they are clueless as to how to do anything to save themselves. One of the best constructed scenes in the film is when Wahlberg’s Elliot uses the scientific method to get some handle on the situation as the sounds of people killing themselves occur all around them.

And yes, that means that Shyamalan’s first R-rating is justly deserved, although he exercises a lot of restraint in relation to say Eli Roth, director of the Hostel films. The director uses gore to accentuate the fear and the violence of the situation and more often than not comes out of nowhere as a surprise, since he more often cuts from the violent act.

Not that you need really bloody scenes, for me, a car cruising down a suburban street where there’s a person hanging by the neck from every other tree is more than creepy enough. Shyamalan also effectively turns foliage into a truly frightening adversary; every flick of a branch is cause for alarm.

The performances though were kind of problematic. I found Wahlberg kind of stagnate in many scenes and the shame of it is that he shows some real life in others; it’s quite a range to cover throughout an hour and a half film. As Alma I thought Deschanel was under utilized and not given much to do outside the typical fretting wife stuff. There was a whole subplot where she was being cell phone stalked by a creep from work named Joey that just left me scratching my heading thinking, why is this important?

By far though, the most bizarre character was Betty Buckley’s Mrs. Jones, who the Moores seek refuge from as they try to outrun the plague. She was crazy in a way that reminded me of Tim Robbins in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The Happening proves once again that while lunatics have the best shelters in a world ending catastrophe, they may not necessarily make the best survival partners.

The other thing about the Mrs Jones scenes is that they highlight the primary flaw of the film: a hodge podge of styles being silly on minute and serious the other, makes for a woefully inconsistent film. Still, there are a lot of interesting ideas in the mix of The Happening so I am recommending it, if only for the sake that raking out Shyamalan seems to be the new hip pastime. For me, I continue to await the return of the Unbreakable Shyamalan.