A woman, disoriented at first, starts repeating herself, pulls a long hairpin from her tresses and pierces her own neck. Over at a construction site, a worker looks on in horror as a body goes splat a few feet away. Another body slams to the ground. When the worker peers into the sky, it's raining leapers. Something—an airborne virus? a particularly devious terrorist attack? Mother Nature rebelling? an accident of some kind?—is prompting people to kill themselves.

Out in Philadelphia, high-school science teacher Elliot Moore (Wahlberg) is yanked from class for an emergency meeting. Due to the events in New York, students are to be sent home. Soon, people in Philadelphia start committing suicide. Elliot heads to rural Pennsylvania, joined on the train ride there by his wife Alma (Deschanel), who's been harboring a secret during a dark stretch in their marriage; his colleague and friend, Julian (Leguizamo), who's a math teacher; and Jess (Sanchez), Julian's 8-year-old daughter.

While the incidents continue to occur on the East Coast, striking big cities, Elliot struggles to contend with what's happening right in front of him: The phenomenon is wending its way from large groups of people to smaller groups to even smaller groups. Julian splits off to search for his wife, entrusting Jess to Elliot and, reluctantly, Alma. And, together, Elliot, Alma and Jess flee, desperate to stay one step ahead of whatever's causing the mayhem.

Atmospheric, but not terribly scary

The Happening is Shyamalan's first film since the disastrous Lady in the Water. Most moviegoers despised the so-called "adult fairy tale," and critics berated Shyamalan for including a reviewer who dies a gruesome death and casting himself as a writer whose words save the world. I, for the record, appreciated individual parts of that movie—especially the performances by Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard—more than its sum total and, if asked to sit through either Lady in the Water or The Happening again, I would chose Lady even though The Happening is the marginally better film.

Shyamalan directs The Happening with a sure hand. It's skillfully made, well paced and inventively shot. The script, however, leaves much to be desired, and there's only so much Shyamalan the director can do to overcome the shortcomings of Shyamalan the writer. The early sequences establish the mood; what's occurring is pretty damn creepy, and the deaths are disturbing and grisly, enough to earn Shyamalan his first R rating. Unfortunately, the air seeps out from there. The central characters run, stop, think, and run, stop, think some more as they dodge the lurking phenomenon and interact with others trying to understand and survive the situation. After a while, it grows repetitive and dull. Worse, though one can see why Shyamalan focused on a troubled couple, Alma comes across as too flighty and too aloof for too long—and she's supposed to be a therapist, though that tidbit comes more from the film's press notes than anything on screen. And it doesn't help that Walhberg and Deschanel have zero chemistry.

Wahlberg anchors the proceedings, playing Elliot as a decent guy trying to keep it together under the most horrific circumstances. Leguizamo does nice work as well, and Deschanel shines in several pivotal scenes. In the film's most emotionally effective scene, Elliot sits in the grass by a roadside, Jess walks over to him, whispers into his ear, and then collapses into his arms as they both cry and hug. All the while, Alma watches the moment unfold from a distance. Shyamalan captures it perfectly, filming Wahlberg and Sanchez in long shot, sans dialogue, and then cutting to a close-up of the wide-eyed Deschanel. Also on hand is Betty Buckley, who turns up as an eccentric old loner and provides a few of the film's most visceral jolts. Shyamalan also spins a potential jump-the-shark moment into a big laugh, as Elliot talks to a plant, and then realizes that he's talking to ... a plant.

In the end, The Happening is moody without being terrifying. The explanation for what's occurring is delivered by talking-head scientists, which is thoroughly anticlimactic. And a tacked-on coda is too obvious for words.