M. Night Shyamalan cratered his career in 2008 with his ecological horror The Happening. Now, in 2025, it’s time to give it a proper reappraisal, and see it for the incredibly bleak masterpiece it is.
In the year 2025, it’s fair to say that M. Night Shyamalan is fully back as a celebrated auteur. He may not have reached the same heights as the early years of his career, such as the 2002 Newsweek cover that proclaimed him “The Next Spielberg”, but he’s consistently put out films over the last decade that have not only been financially successful, but have also felt like a fully formed auteurs voice.
Shyamalan’s specific style has essentially been cemented over the 6 films he’s directed since 2015. They are modern pulp, feeling like cinematic retellings of Twilight Zone episodes and old paperback thrillers, all shot with a flair for the dramatic. Some have been high concept science fiction (such as Old or Split), or simple concepts that take dramatic twists and turns (like Trap and Knock at The Cabin). His films have consistently been gorgeous to look at, and his writing style unique, his characters existing in heightened realities where the dialogue is more about the emotional truth than the realistic truth.
After nearly a decade of being viewed as a hack, and then another decade rebuilding his reputation, Shyamalan has finally become celebrated for his filmography, with most of his work, from both his early years to his resurgence, getting the respect they deserve.
So why is it that The Happening is still widely viewed as a massive misstep? Why hasn’t it received the reappraisal it deserves, in light of our modern understanding and acceptance of Shyamalan’s “whole deal”?
Come with me, if you would, to the (depressingly) faraway year of 2008. The global economy crashes into one of the worst financial crises in history, Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States, and Shyamalan’s career is on the ropes. While easily one of the best of his career, The Village was met with lukewarm reception in 2004, and Lady In The Water flopped hard in 2006. Shyamalan needed a win, and a big one at that. The solution? His first R-rated film! That’s what every single ad for The Happening made sure to let us know back then.
Released over that summer, The Happening, while a box office success, was met with incredibly negative critical and audience response, which essentially killed Shyamalan’s career for nearly a decade. The mix of deeply violent imagery against on-the-surface goofy dialogue completely turned off an audience who had come to expect a very specific level of awe and gravitas from the filmmaker who had made The Six Sense and Signs, films that you could arguably add the “elevated horror” moniker to.
But, moving away from the very specific disdain the whole world seemed to feel towards this back in 2008, and looking at it with fresh eyes, and an understanding of the rest of Shyamalan’s filmography, you can see that not only is The Happening completely in line with the rest of his work, but is one of the more fascinating and, yeah, I’ll say it, best films.
For those who know The Happening more for its memes and critical status as a dud, what it is is a story of survival in the middle of a bewildering and terrifying attack. The Happening follows a school teacher (Mark Wahlberg) and his estranged wife (played by Zooey Deschanel) as they attempt to escape an ecological attack that causes all affected to kill themselves.
While that description sounds a bit goofy on the surface, Shyamalan, like he does with all his films, takes it seriously. This is never a film that is “tongue in cheek”, or gives a wink at its audience like it is also in on the joke. The Happening is bleak, it is violent, it is incredibly mean spirited, but it is also incredibly earnest in what it is doing, both in the horror and in its tale of survival.
The violence in The Happening is no joke. For those who lived through this film’s marketing, you probably mostly remember the clip of the guy laying in front of the lawn mower, or the hanging yard workers, both images that seem a bit goofy in a vacuum. The actual deaths portrayed here are deeply horrific and can be hard to watch at times; a woman slowly sliding a knitting needle into her neck, a father calmly slicing his own wrists, a soldier shouting an army mantra as he shoots himself in the head, a woman listening to her daughter over the phone as she jumps to her death. In one of the most harrowing scenes, we watch as a building full of people leap to their death, first from the ground level as we hear the bodies crash, then from an upward angle, as we watch clothing whips in the fatal breeze as the men plummet to their death.
That last image might sound familiar, and is just one symbolic visual in a film that is very much about September 11th. While tackling the subject of post-attack America wasn’t something new to Shyamalan, with The Village implicitly being about the way we reacted in the face of terror, The Happening is his explicit film about the attack. The imagery is all there; the falling dead, the classrooms filled with confused students as teachers huddle in front of a television showing horrifying violence, a nation in complete panic, attempting to flee the cities in droves. While the attack here is entirely ecological, it has the same effect as a human driven terror attack, as the world is dropped into chaos, everyone just trying to get a grip on what is actually happening.
Shyamalan has continued to explore people’s reaction to inexorable and fatal situations, such as Old and Knock on The Cabin, and with The Happening, that focus on human reaction shifts towards what it means to be alive, and who do we want to spend those fleeting moments with. What has been mocked in the past about The Happenings is its dialogue, which, in 2008, definitely seemed stilted and just incredibly weird. But now, with a better picture of how Shyamalan creates the people within his worlds, it becomes clear that the dialogue here isn’t meant to be the realistic conversations of people stuck in the middle of a terror attack, and more of a representation of their inner thoughts and emotional truths.
It is also quite funny, in an entirely purposeful way. Shyamalan has shown to have a “unique” sense of humor, usually throwing in bits and gags at the strangest times, such as the conversation about the utility of hotdogs during a mad dash to escape, or checking the nose of a fake glass of wine while explaining the potential cause of all the mass deaths. It’s a real “if it floats your boat” type deal, for sure, but I found those bits hilarious.
Now, where I will partially concede to the haters is the casting. I don’t think either of the leads are truly “bad” here, but their willingness to buy into Shyamalan’s script is where the breakdown occurs. To what I’m going to assume is your surprise, I actually don’t think Wahlberg is doing anything heinous here; in fact, I’d say he fits in pretty perfectly as a Shyamalan protagonist. Wahlberg fully commits to the bit, never underselling it, and even in the few “oversells”, it matches with his character, who is a high school science teacher in way over his head.
Deschanel, on the other hand, is where that breakdown occurs. She doesn’t seem to know how to act to the material, so there is a bit of a coldness she retains, all the way through to the romantic ending, which keeps both us, and Wahlberg’s affections, at arms reach. This isn’t saying that it cratered the film at all, mind you, but more of an imperfection that, I believe, kept it from being a critical hit back in 2008.
All of this, the violence, the laughs, the romance, the scares; all of it not only works, but is amplified and made cinematic, through the incredibly gorgeous cinematography from legendary DP Tak Fujimoto. Shyamalan and Fujimoto had collaborated several times prior, on both The Sixth Sense and Signs, and here, Fujimoto shoots The Happening beautifully. The juxtaposition he creates, of the world created by man being gray and washed out, and the world of nature being brightly green and full of life, makes for unnerving film, as the violence slowly creeps from the gray world of the city centers into the more lush world of the surrounding woods and forests, the worlds coming together with a violent smash, as the soft greens and yellows of nature paint a scene of a woman violently bashing her head in on the side of her house. A beautiful, lush world of unspeakable violence.
Listen, if you’re not already in the bag for Shyamalan, I don’t think there is anything I could say about The Happening that’d change your mind. If you decided to bounce out of Old the minute we were introduced to a character named “Mid-Sized Sedan”, The Happening isn’t for you. But, for those that have either held the light for Shyamalan since the early days and viewed this as a misstep back in 2008, or for those new to his work who’ve clicked with his style but only really know this from that “What? No!” meme, you owe yourself the chance to judge it on its own merits, away from the expectations of 2008, and with a better understanding of who Shyamalan is as a storyteller.
Who knows; maybe you too will find it in your heart to apologize to a fake ficus.
