Last weekend, I had the chance to go see The Happening. My thought was that it would be a typical, suspenseful, yet profound movie from M. Night; however, it was hardly those things.

Ever since Signs, I’ve loved the simpleness of M. Night’s plots and the profound message they convey (Signs: seemingly coincidental events really being the workings of a higher power, The Village: the notion that love can overcome any obstacle, etc).

Unfortunately, I went into the theater with the idea that people just disappeared in this movie (Someone had said “rapture-esque” a while back). That is NOT what happens. They commit suicide- and when I mean “they”, I mean just about everyone.

Strange as it may seem, this is a movie about love. The two main characters are somewhat remorsefully married and spend much of the movie distant from each other. The plot is fairly predictable from start to end, so don’t expect surprises like the end of The Village. The movie seems to rely almost solely on its shock factor, as neither the acting (except, perhaps, Mark Wahlberg), the effects, nor the plot really do it justice. It really feels like an independant-type film where everything is just B-grade. Granted, that worked for both Juno and Napoleon Dynamite, but those were comedies.

More shocking that this blatant failure at a movie was my response. I know the … suicides weren’t real, but shouldn’t I have been a bit more bothered by them? Granted, I was very unsettled, but to me, they were almost … interesting. I walked out of the theater thinking about the movie and a little in shock. I didn’t know then how to quantify what I had just seen. The ending was amazing- I’ll give it that, but have we devolved so far as a society to find depicted, graphic suicide entertainment?