The knives had been out and sharpened long before M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, “The Happening,” opened on Friday. A fine craftsman with aspirations to the canon, this would-be auteur has, in the last few years, experienced a sensational fall from critical and commercial grace, partly through his own doing  by making bad movies and then, even after those movies failed, by continuing to feed his ego publicly  and partly through the entertainment media that, once they smell weakness, will always bite the hand they once slathered in drool.

The signal-to-noise ratio has become so lopsided when it comes to Mr. Shyamalan that “The Happening” was marked for failure even before it had a chance to fail  or succeed. Its worth as a cultural and aesthetic object had been rendered moot, never mind that it turns out to be a divertingly goofy thriller with an animistic bent, moments of shivery and twitchy suspense and a solid lead performance from Mark Wahlberg. Much like Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix in “Signs,” which this film resembles in mood, effectiveness and flaws, Mr. Wahlberg fits into the Shyamalan universe comfortably. He rides the spooky stuff with as much ease as he does the jokes, the manufactured sincerity and cornball messages.

I won’t say too much about the gimmick that Mr. Shyamalan has come up with this time around, only that it’s funny, dark and weird and involves some nasty payback from the natural world. The story opens on a bustlingly bright New York day with two women sharing a bench in Central Park. One hears something, the other doesn’t, and before you know it, one benchwarmer has slipped a hair stick out of her do and into her own neck. The blood continues to trickle, but soon runs into the streets as men and women across the city commit similarly inexplicable acts of self-annihilation, with bullets to the head or, in a queasy, presumably intentional visual echo of Sept. 11, plunges from on high.

This is the first R-rated feature from Mr. Shyamalan, who’s left the PG-13 world behind presumably to entice that much-coveted demographic, the young male bloodsucker. Going graphic has neither hurt nor harmed him, though from all the inventive ways he’s found to do away with characters, it’s hard not to wonder if he’s not extracting symbolic revenge on the fickle moviegoing public. Whatever the case, the opening’s body count works to his foundational purposes, creating an uneasy, unsettled atmosphere. Mr. Shyamalan’s words consistently fail him, as they have in the past. But working again with the cinematographer Tak Fujimoto (a longtime shooter for Jonathan Demme), he creates images  bodies falling, trees rustling  that at their most potent speak louder and more eloquently than those words.