Pop Smart - The Happening: M. Night Shyamalan can’t break out of his rut

The trailers for M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller give away the supernatural premise. Beginning in New York’s Central Park, an unexplained phenomenon — what novelist Don DeLillo would call “an airborne toxic event” — causes innocent bystanders to commit suicide. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel play a young married couple trying to stay ahead of the silent catastrophe as it strikes smaller towns and population centers.

A different kind of outbreak appears to have affected the characters in Shyamalan’s movies, who have become the equivalent of pod people. Shyamalan’s brilliant breakout film The Sixth Sense, with its warm, sympathetic interplay between Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, increasingly seems like a fluke. I’m a defender of his crop-circles film Signs, but even then, his dialogue became less natural, the performances more stilted. Success seems to have robbed Shyamalan of the human touch.