Throughout M. Night Shyamalan’s career, the director has always handled the building of suspense with a gifted intuition. In The Happening, the suspense is still present in moderate doses, but his notions of terror just don’t complement his attention to buildup. As each of the director’s films goes by, his concepts of horror gradually diminish and the psychological thrills are replaced with more generic and less inspired forms of creating scares.

A vicious chemical attack occurs in New York City and quickly spreads to neighboring states, causing mass hysteria and countless deaths. Of the few survivors able to get clear of the affected area, science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his troubled wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) must overcome their personal dilemmas to save those whose lives have been entrusted to them.

With Shyamalan’s clever setups and unique ideas for suspense, resorting to more savage visuals seems below the director’s normal methods. Yet The Happening is indeed rated R for violence, though the deaths never really require such visceral exhibitions and don’t even utilize the boundaries the rating offers. The film is neither overly bloody nor excessively brutal, and the gore doesn’t enhance the scares. In Hitchcock’s The Birds, violence was used to complement the terror and a creature certainly not synonymous with horror became a nightmarish purveyor of fear. Shyamalan attempts to copy this strategy with his own unusual villain, but fails to use gore to his advantage and the threat caused never reaches a satisfying level of trepidation.

Again the director has filled his cast with notable and mostly wise choices, as Wahlberg easily portrays the quick-thinking science teacher tasked with protecting his makeshift family. Flimsy dialogue can’t keep the actor from bringing an engaging character to life, though more development couldn’t have hurt. Zooey Deschanel creates an interesting counterpart, though her role never garners the required screen time to flesh out a more complex relationship with her costar. Almost all of the supporting characters stand out but receive such little attention from the camera that their efforts are all but wasted. Both John Leguizamo’s Julian and Betty Buckley’s infinitely creepy Mrs. Jones never fully realize their potential in the brief amount of time they’re given.

While several scenes showcase the director’s admirable grasp on building suspense, his visions of true fear have become as clouded as The Happening’s opening credits. Amping up the film’s display of bloodletting to earn an R rating has done little to increase the actual terror committed to the screen, and we’re left with what is likely the first ever public service announcement horror film.

- Joel Massie