The Happening

(R), written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

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His new movie, "The Happening," continues M. Night Shyamalan's record of consistently wasting opportunities to create a good story out of some promising materials. In both "Signs" and "The Village," for example, he began with a perfectly acceptable premise, proceeded to build something of an intelligent subtext, then allowed his picture to disintegrate into absurdity. The utter silliness of his last movie, "Lady in the Water," which added elements with the mechanical doggedness of a 10-year-old with an Erector Set, simply accumulated plot and characters at the expense of intelligence and logic.

In "The Happening" Shyamalan considers a perfectly relevant subject, a phenomenon that might be described as the revolt of the vegetable kingdom. Beginning in Central Park and spreading rapidly throughout the Northeast, people experience the deadly effects of a neurotoxin released by trees, shrubs, and grasses. The poison, apparently carried on a wind generated by the plants, affects brain function, initially confusing and paralyzing the victims, then somehow causing them, in a state of absolute calm, to kill themselves.

The film concentrates on the efforts of a high school science teacher, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), together with his wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), and Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), the daughter of a friend, to escape the menace by escaping to the Pennsylvania countryside. As they flee the city, they witness a seemingly endless series of suicides among their fellow refugees and gradually discover new facts about the toxin and new methods of eluding it. They also encounter a series of eccentrics and downright crazies, who react with increasing hostility and violence to the desperate group.

Like much of Shyamalan's other work, as the stress of their predicament emphasizes Alma's uneasiness with her marriage, the movie turns into a study of the small nuclear family. Like "Lady in the Water," it also exhibits an aura of improvisation, transforming the escape into an odyssey of weirdness, a linear, episodic flight across rural America that tacks on incidents and adds people without much point and ends nowhere in particular.

Whenever it runs out of ideas, "The Happening" settles for a number of mostly irrelevant shocks and frights. The director compensates for the lack of horror within the menace itself - a wind and some waving grasses hardly provide the genre's necessary red meat - with some truly bizarre evidence of the toxin's effect. In Manhattan, in a reference to the World Trade Center catastrophe, workers rain down from skyscrapers; in a small town people hang themselves from trees like some grotesque giant fruit; a man starts a large riding lawnmower, lies quietly down, and allows it to mow him to death; another undramatically feeds himself to the lions in a zoo.

When the menace ceases and the horror ends, as end it must, the inevitable reconciliation and resolution occur within a vacuum; a more or less normal life resumes, and the deaths of thousands of people apparently change nothing. The director blithely ignores any indication of the expected aftershock of such a widespread catastrophe, the result of the loss of thousands of lives, the sort of moral and ethical introspection that should deepen the meaning and impact of his film. He shows some visual hints and some expert's speculation about the cause of the phenomenon, including pollution, global warming, and nuclear contamination, but even within the general awareness of ecology that constitutes its context, settles instead for some vague mumblings about inexplicable acts of nature.

The cardboard characters, impersonated by dull actors, especially Zooey Deschanel, fail to impart much in the way of life to the film's preposterous events, which tends to make the exaggerated frights colossally unconvincing, more comic than scary, the greatest problem for all dabblers in gore. The idea of some revolt in the vegetable kingdom, of a menace from plant life, need not duplicate the silliness of "The Happening"; human damage to the environment, in the logic of horror, may properly inspire retaliation. The best works to show the dangerous potential in organic nature remain the first two adaptations of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and, to a lesser degree, "The Day of the Triffids," neither silly nor disappointing, and unlike "The Happening," full of possibility.