He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.

M. Night Shyamalan gets great spurts of energy when he visualizes the dead, in this case victims of a plague of suicide sweeping the Northeast in his new film, "The Happening."

If you like suicide, here's your main ride. All others, steer clear. As Shyamalan imagines it (as usual, he wrote, directed and produced it and appears in a cameo, just like whatshisname), a strange airborne toxin is loosed upon the region, beginning in New York's Central Park at exactly 8:33 in the morning. The superb cinematographer Tak Fujimoto (who also shot Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" and "Signs") manages to capture the exact weight of the wind as it presses against the foliage of that leafy glen, and soon people have stopped moving for a few seconds and then hastened to find methods of self-obliteration.

Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) and his wide-eyed wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), plus a friendly couple's child, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), take to the road in a tide of refugees.

Shyamalan, unlike the directors of the far better "Birds," "War" and even "Dawn," isn't entirely sure what kind of movie he's making, and he shuffles through personalities looking for one that interests him. "The Happening" stutter-steps its way in this direction and that to a disappointing ending.

-- Stephen Hunter (June 13, 2008)

Contains disturbing images, gore and violence, some directed at children.