One of Stephen King's most important contributions to both the horror novel and the horror film, the possibility of menace in the ordinary and the commonplace, occupies a special place in "The Mist," the latest in a long line of movies based on his work. Although the monsters and their methods in the new film provide all the shocks and thrills that contemporary cinematic wizardry can invent, "The Mist" concentrates on some less obvious material, a sort of sociological subtext, a study of some significant dynamics in American society.

In the best traditions of its form, the picture builds slowly, establishing its simple, static situation as a kind of knowing tease of its audience's expectations. Following a ferocious storm, the mist of the title creeps down from a mountain to engulf a community in Maine; legions of monsters lurk in the mist, the result of some secret military experiment gone horribly wrong. A commercial artist, David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his young son Billy (Nathan Gamble), and his irascible neighbor Brent Norton (Andre Braugher) find themselves trapped inside the local supermarket by the dense fog and the mysterious threat of some menace that begins as a rumor but materializes into something quite real and entirely dreadful.

The monsters resemble some of the more repulsive creatures we all know - giant, venomous dragonflies; spiders with corrosive webs; a sort of mobile octopus with mouths in its huge tentacles; even a behemoth whose tread shakes the earth. The alien menace outside the supermarket, however, also generates a human danger inside, as the customers, reacting to the situation, fracture into factions. Some want to defend themselves, others refuse to believe in the menace at all, others fall under the spell of a Bible-spouting religious fanatic (Marcia Gay Harden), who preaches that they dwell in the End Times, and must sacrifice some of their fellows to appease the Almighty.

The reiterated attacks of the monsters serve to reveal a self-contained society inside the store, with divisions and tensions involving such familiar concepts as class, income, ethnicity, and religion. Some unlikely people reveal hitherto unsuspected qualities of courage and resourcefulness, while others shrink from any sense of duty to the community or deny both facts and reason to pursue their own irrational beliefs. The religious fanatic ultimately forms her own congregation, with a majority of customers following her mad whims and attacking the rationalists, who themselves engage in a brief seminar in moral philosophy when confronted with a further tragedy.

Beneath their shocks and scares and the author's penchant for graphic gore, Stephen King's novels and films often employ the dysfunctional family or the deteriorating marriage as a subtext. In "The Mist," however, the notion of a disintegrating society not unlike our own supplies the foundation for the ostensible subject, so that inside the supermarket an acceptable microcosm of America forms, jealous and insecure, haunted by fear, blinded by a variety of prejudices, unable to unite around any reasonable ideal, and ready to follow any ranting fool. The location itself provides an appropriate laboratory for the examination of the national psyche, a genuinely American invention, a suitable symbol of the consumer society and a place where all social and economic classes mingle, and in this case, where unimaginable danger lurks just beyond the bags of dog food, the boxes of cereal, and the cans of peas.

As the situation grows increasingly desperate, the director tends to tighten his close-ups and move his camera more irregularly, heightening the claustrophobia and emphasizing the growing fear of the people trapped inside. The static nature of the enclosed society and the frequency of those close-ups also intensifies the essential inertia of the plot, so that the dangers and the responses tend to repeat themselves throughout the film.

That repetition also influences the generally competent cast, so that the actors establish a character, then settle into a series of attitudes, gestures, and speeches that remain very much the same from beginning to end. The ending itself suggests a horror beyond any of the previous images in the movie, the closure that the form demands, but also a despair that transcends the usual conclusions of the genre, a horror beyond horror. 

The Mist

(R) directed by Frank Darabont

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