When it comes to M. Night Shyamalan movies, it's a difficult task to talk about them without giving a few things away. With its mysterious trailers and ambiguous title, The Happening makes it particularly impossible. So while I promise not to give away any revelations along the lines of Bruce Willlis was dead the whole time or the Village is actually a psychological experiment, be aware that to even begin to discuss The Happening, I'm going to have to reveal a few more details than its trailer.

From the trailer, you know that there is something happening. People are dropping dead en masse on the streets of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. It might be a terrorist attack. It might be a government project gone awry. Or, it might be a natural phenomenon that will never be explained. Something is happening, it's not good, and at least at its outset, it's pretty clear that no one knows what in the world is going on.

Jump from the trailer to the movie, and the first thing that is revealed in more detail is the actual nature of the event. As the trailer says, its first effect on humans is the loss of speech. The second is physical disorientation. And the third is fatal. But as we see, the third and final effect is a little bit more than people just dropping dead. In fact, whatever it is isn't actually killing people itself. Come stage three, people all over the eastern seaboard are killing themselves.

As much as being killed by someone else is horrible, as much as death by government or corporate mistake is appalling, the idea of something that compels you to take your own life is almost more disturbing than any death at the hands of another. To be killed by someone else is to be a reluctant victim of a lack of respect for human life. But to kill yourself is to first become a part of that disrespect and then become its victim. And while the relationship with a killer and his victim is obviously a toxic one, when that same poison spreads into your relationship with yourself, I don't know about you, but that scares me a lot more.

In many ways, one of the central themes of The Happening is relationship. One of the theories presented to explain the events is that plants are actually at the center of it all. Whether it is because of our nuclear power, our smog, or our far-from-biodegradable waste, somewhere along the line, we have become too much of a threat to the plants, and they have responded by striking back. In other words, our relationship with mother earth is bad; our abuse has finally gone too far, and thus, what we get in return is not pretty.

Throughout the movie, the main story follows husband and wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg). And the truth is, their relationship isn't the healthiest either. Conversation reveals that they have recently had some sort of major argument. Phone calls, and later a confession, bring to light a man named Joey who Alma went out with recently and has been talking to since. At one stop along their journey, a woman asks them, "Who's chasing whom?" The implication being that their relationship is one of imbalance rather than common center, of distance rather than union, and one in which its partners just cannot agree to come together.

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