This is why The Happening has to play as an anti-film. To reinforce this abstraction, this inability to connect with the conventions of societal (or in this case cinematic) expectation. It’s a sister piece to Shyamalan’s own Signs, in which everything happened for a reason. Even the most trivial event tied together at the end of Signs to demonstrate the workings of an omnipotent greater force. If Signs was an overtly religious film stating without doubt that there is indeed a God, The Happening is the opposite; a spiritual plea for help – a desperate crisis of faith.

At its heart though, this is a film about suicide. It’s Shyamalan trying to process his horror at the enormity of someone taking their own life. A tortured longing to understand and to soothe the pain of simply living. The text, when you boil it down, is about a man (quite literally) running away from the seemingly inescapable impulse to kill himself. Throughout the film, almost every other character tries to force Elliot to make decisions and take control. They want his help and he can’t even help himself. They scream out for him to bring order into the chaos. The scene in which he yells “Give me a Goddamn second!” and tries to apply science to the situation as half of the party he’s with start to kill themselves is fraught with the pain of a man who can’t cope, who can’t rationally apply order to anything, yet is terrified by the threat of chaos taking control.

In one scene, Elliot seeks shelter in a “model home” where everything (even the wine) is made of plastic. A sign outside states “YOU DESERVE THIS”. The whole world is trying to force order upon Elliot, to make him accept even his own contentment as something he should take charge of, and he can’t face it. In another scene, he sings a jaunty tune in a weird falsetto to prove that he’s “normal” (coming across as anything but). He becomes increasingly abstracted from the world as the film goes on and the pressure increases to take charge of his life. It’s a clear metaphor for the ever-creeping shadow of depression; the frustration of knowing what to do in theory but being unable to bring order to the chaos of the mind. As the film progresses, slowing the pace, paring down the characters, stripping Elliot of almost everyone around him, leaving him no one and nothing to turn to, his surrender to the void seems almost inevitable. Each shot gets wider and lasts longer, expanding to the point where the emptiness is tangible. Tak Fujimoto (of Badlands fame)’s cinematography here is a breathtakingly poignant translation of a director’s very difficult vision.

The final scenes are heartbreaking. Even when I watched them again recently to write this piece, I’m sure I almost forgot to breathe. Elliot and Alma sit in separate houses, communicating through an old talking tube that goes under the ground. It’s symbolic of the separation that the suicidally depressed feel from those who love them; Elliot wants to relate but can’t. The doors aren’t locked, there’s nothing standing between them except the air – the air that, if they go out into it, may cause him to kill himself. The abstract mental chaos that could tip him over the edge. When they take the plunge and walk towards one another to embrace in slow motion, it’s a revelatory, deeply moving moment, as positive a message as one could take from a film so achingly melancholy.

Things work out for them and the “happening” stops as quickly as it started. There is no reason for anything. Sometimes things happen. Sometimes people die. Sometimes they don’t. The world is cruel, unfair, without rules or structure. We can only try our best to survive (which brings us full circle – The Happening is in fact the survival movie we were promised, just deconstructed and reassembled into something entirely new). Yet the very last scene in the film – everything beginning again in Paris – leaves the viewer caught in an existential loop. A disconnection from reality can strike anywhere, to anyone, at any time. Life is precious and all too fragile. A thought as comforting as it is terrifying.