Film critics have been giving M. Night Shyamalan, the director of The Sixth Sense, a hard time since he released Signs in 2002. Yet despite his recent flops, Shyamalan is in fact one of the few competent genre directors left, and Hollywood can't afford to lose him.
His latest movie, The Happening, is an old-fashioned supernatural thriller in the same vein as Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). It is an apocalyptic and paranoid tale about nature seeking revenge on humans.
The film opens with people in New York City suddenly committing violent suicides - from jumping off buildings to throwing themselves to lions in the zoo. The epidemic spreads quickly affecting the entire northeastern US within hours.
Mark Wahlberg, who got his big break as the hero fleeing from talking monkeys in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes in 2001, reminds us that he is one the few solid actors left in Hollywood, playing a science teacher on the run from nature's assault.
It turns out that the attack is caused by plants, which release airborne neurotoxins to prevent our race destroying the planet. Hats off to evolution.
With the help of a superb score by Shyamalan's long-term collaborator James Newton Howard, the film is unsettling and disturbing. Never has the sight of fluttering leaves in the breeze been so ominous and chilling.
