There's something "Happening" here; what it is ain't exactly clear

Meet Elliot and Alma, a young married couple who live in an improbably elegant town house in Philadelphia. Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) is a high-school science teacher and ... well, he's a high-school science teacher, in that genial way Wahlberg has of playing characters who appear to have no complexities whatsoever. Alma (Zooey Deschanel) is a therapist with a habit of opening her eyes very, very wide, almost zombie-wide, which is confusing in a horror movie. And she's carrying around a Dark Secret: She has, we learn, had dessert with another man, a mysterious "Joey" who keeps calling her cellphone. "We ate tiramisu together!" she admits, wretchedly, into the phone. (Is that what the kids are calling it these days?)

In between all this marital- and dessert-related drama, something else is going on — "an event," as somebody calls it early in the movie. And that's the biggest problem with "The Happening," M. Night Shyamalan's latest thriller: The real story too often seems to be playing second fiddle to Elliot and Alma's minor-league relationship problems. Due to a terrorist attack or some freakish natural event (nobody's sure in the movie at first), people suddenly start committing suicide en masse, first in Central Park, then throughout a large area of the East Coast, including the Pennsylvania countryside where Elliot and Alma have fled the city with a friend's little daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez) in tow.

This is chilling stuff, and some early shots of New York construction workers deliberately falling from skyscrapers is genuinely haunting. But Shyamalan, who brilliantly showed in "The Sixth Sense" that he knows how to capture an audience with ominous quiet, seems to be coasting here. The screenplay is a mess, filled with unfunny moments of intended humor and funny moments of unintended humor. (A preteen boy, running for his life with Elliot and Alma, takes the opportunity to lecture them about why they haven't had kids.) And it's the sort of movie in which you can tell, from the opening minutes, who will die horribly and who will live to, ahem, eat tiramisu again. Sadly, too many of the better actors die, leaving the blander ones behind.

Though I kept wondering whether we'd be told why Alma chose to flee the apocalypse in a lovely blue halter dress and heels (Was she thinking there'd be some fabulous post-disaster after-party? Had she just seen "Sex and the City"?), "The Happening" has no particular twist, as Shyamalan's movies often do. It's a straight-up disaster/horror flick, filled with gruesome deaths, plenty of running and Wahlberg earnestly explaining scientific concepts to people who have more pressing concerns. But for it to really work, we have to care about Elliot and Alma, the way we cared about little Cole and his mother in "The Sixth Sense." Here they seem like pretty afterthoughts, forced to carry a movie without being given the muscle to do so.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com