‘The Happening’: Shyamalan’s Greatest Twist Was Hiding a Deadpan Comedy in Plain Sight

Though we’ve almost completely exhausted apocalypse media suggestion lists purporting to help survive self-isolation, there’s one more flick that, for some baffling reason, hasn’t made the cut as a genre favourite. Never referenced, often forgotten, and perpetually scoffed at is the brilliant work of M. Night Shyamalan, master of the twist, with his film that lampoons our current necessity to limit our group sizes, The Happening. Billed as a horror film, M. Night’s masterpiece is dismissed as a poorly written, badly directed, and worse acted disaster. But, for the approval of the midnight society, I submit that M. Night’s greatest twist of all was hiding a deadpan comedy in plain sight.

M. Night Shyamalan made his name quickly as the guy who’s always got a twist up his sleeve when “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.” For better or for worse, it led to that expectation being slapped onto every one of his films, and those without that signature twist being slaughtered by fans. But the twist in The Happening, his spooky tale of humanity being driven to self-harm by an unknown entity presumed to be plants and the heroic science teacher keeping his family alive, blew past us all.

By rattling through comedic versions of tired tropes, M. Night leaned on his own characters to call out parody via meta-in jokes, having them ask if characters are serious, lamenting when they build suspense with their speech, and at one point even calling out that characters are “acting odd,” before pivoting to an unnecessary and inexplicable anecdote about crying at a wedding.

It’s difficult to imagine that the man who blazed into stardom with his artistic tense horror heavyweight, The Sixth Sense, would so quickly devolve into creating a movie that has bonkers phone call scenes written as clunky exposition dumps. It just can’t be the same guy who wrote such a bananas tale of humanity being attacked by plants. Yet, critics seemed to think it was. The Hollywood Reporter said, “The ecological idea of Planet Earth striking back at humankind might bring a smile to Al Gore, but in terms of cinematic intrigue and nail-biting tension, it’s just not happening.”

It’s hard to imagine Mark Wahlberg, the same dude who balanced comedy and drama flawlessly for The Departed, being such a rookie that he fumbled over his serious horror driven lines, removing any ounce of sincerity and replacing it with a lilt. The Atlantic imagined it, saying, “A bad plot can be only so bad without a bad performance at the center of it, and star Mark Wahlberg delivers.”

The Daily Mail lambasted the plot and the performances, stating, “Paradoxically, for a movie which is about murderous maples, homicidal hornbeams and rampaging rhododendrons, our hero turns out to be the most scarily wooden thing in it.”

We’re talking about a filmmaker who made high quality horror with few missteps, and then went on to make a horror comedy with The Visit. The Happening wasn’t an error, it was his test run on the way from one to the other, fine-tuning his ability to layer trauma, horror and comedy.

At first, it seems genius that M. Night managed to hide his deadpan comedy from the collective consciousness, but with just a minor squint, the obviousness of this masterpiece should become clear. At one point, the persistently robotic Mark Wahlberg, as Elliot Moore, delivers a left-field anecdote about a choice encounter with a cute pharmacist. His wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel) looks directly at him and asks what the entire audience should be wondering, “Are you joking?”

The poorly delivered clunky dialogue isn’t what it appears, it’s a deadpan meta comment forcing us to question, “Is this movie joking?” Did Zooey shake off her lineage peppered with award winning performances to bluntly ask, “Are you joking?” Of course not, she was expertly deadpanning in a performance worthy of The Lobster.

It hits too close to home when Elliot, facing down the threat, concludes, “Whatever it is, terrorists, nuclear disaster, plants, it’s probably safe to get away from people right now.” Then Elliot, the hero, tries to reason with a plant. Because the science teacher, who learns that plants can communicate with each other using chemicals, thinks he can communicate with them using English. What an excellent lampoon of the Working Class Hero trope.

The Happening boasts an excellent roster of trope parodies. Elliot is our War of the Worlds dockworker, he’s our Armageddon oil driller, the science teacher who saves the protagonists with a base level knowledge of botany and the scientific method. At one heated point, the group looks to Elliot to save them while he begs for time to think (right after hearing a gunshot and deadpanning “Oh no.”). In a “just in time” hero move, Elliot recites the scientific method while everyone stands and gawks, then he shouts, “Stay ahead of the wind.” Phew, good thing he was here.

As an extension of that trope, Julian (John Leguizamo), a math teacher, delivers life saving information via… unknowable statistics. At one point, believing they see help ahead, the gang meets Private Auster (Jeremy Strong. I know I know, Kendall Roy!), the perfect adaptation of the military man in a disaster movie who rattles through useless military jargon and falls victim to his own gun. Absolute jarhead. When finding authorities, the gang of survivors begs for information delivered in a way that builds tension, forcing yet another meta-dead-pan bit when Elliot shouts “Why are you giving us one useless piece of information at a time?!” Shredding through the frustrating trope of a character not getting information out because they’re being talked over, Alma is able to lay out an excruciating rant about how it was “Just tiramisu” before the man on the other end of her call is able to spit out the incredibly pertinent information that makes it to the remaining characters just moments later. At one point, there’s a news report about biological weapons played over a militia suiting up, playing on the American paranoia portrayed in The Crazies. It’s hard to imagine that the same genre fans who flock to Jim Jarmusch could miss this blatant deadpanning, but M. Night really outdid himself in hiding this twist.

Though the film beats us over the head with the fact that it’s laughing in the face of common tropes via deadpan, it takes us a step further when the survivors come across an empty home. Staged beautifully, one of the kids notes “Everything’s fake!” as the camera pans through real looking computer screens, a kitchen, and a realistic glass of orange juice. Not letting us off the hook, Elliot then sits at the meticulously staged dinner table and pontificates while whipping around a fake full glass of wine like one might expect every movie character holding a paper cup of coffee would. Surely, he knows it’s fake to be tilting it around with such disregard, but he ends his monologue by taking a sniff. Hilarious.

Early in this masterpiece, the same director who built an entirely successful film around a subtle newscast in Signs, uses a comparable newscast to show a tiger ripping an emotionless man limb from limb, blood shooting from each appendage reminiscent of a Monty Python gag. He parodied his own style, right in our faces. The Happening gave us a film that wasn’t about any real killer, but hinted it might be about nationalism, post 9/11 fears and American paranoia. Then it dared us to ask if we should take it seriously. Then, in his greatest twist of all, M. Night refused to give us the answer. I think I’m right about this, but, like Elliot says, “Science will come up with some reason to put in the books, but in the end, it’s just a theory.”