Review: The Happening (DVD)

Following the miscue with Lady In the Water and the disappointing The Village, M. Night Shyamalan needed a bounce-back movie that proved he could still create effective cinema. While The Happening may not be a complete vindication, it is a step in the right direction toward re-establishing himself has an effective thriller and suspense director.

The Happening is also noteworthy in that it is the first R-rated feature Shyamalan has ever made. While The Happening is an R, it places its use of those freedoms appropriately into cinematic intensity, rather than needless excesses.

The opening sequence is a perfect example of this judicious lack of restraint; two female friends are talking in a city park; one of them stops mid-sentence, repeats herself and then, as her friend is reacting to some off-screen horror, she withdraws a knitting-needle-like hairpin from her hair, places the point of it at her own neck as her friend turns back to see what she is doing, and then begins – slowly – to plunge the needle into her own neck.

What makes the film an R is not a bunch of frivolous nudity or a huge, gory gunfight, but simply the fact that Shyamalan allows his camera to linger a bit longer on the horror unfolding on-screen. In a PG-13 cut of the film, we would have seen the needle poised at her neck, then cut away to a close-up of her friend screaming; in the R-rated edit, we see the needle pierce the neck.

That’s the difference and even in this excess, Shyamalan shows judicious restraint, using the lingering camera just long enough to amp up the suspense and growing sense of horror, but not indulging in the gore for too long as to blunt its shock value in the way a teen slasher movie might.

The DVD release follows a rather successful run at the box office; The Happening made $64 million domestically and $163 million in worldwide box office, against a modest, $48 million budget. That’s a huge improvement over Lady In the Water, which made only $42 million domestically and $72 million worldwide against a production budget of $70 million. The Village was extremely successful at the box office and only a critical failure, drawing $256 million worldwide in box office against a $60 million budget.

So, while The Happening made money, which is an improvement, Shyamalan still has a ways to go before it can be said that he’s mended fences with moviegoers enough to draw them back in at the level he did with such films as The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and, yes, the disappointing but high-grossing The Village.

There is a satisfying number of special features included on the DVD release, including several mini-documentaries that go into detail on the behind-the-scenes stuff and about the only thing they don’t discuss is whether they used Cisco routers for their Internet connections on the set.

The only real complaint here is the lack of a decent commentary track; hearing M. Night, Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel dish on the production would have added to the enjoyment. Other than that, The Happening is a solid DVD release that delivers the goods better than any movie Shyamalan has helmed since Signs.