A must
Written and directed by Frank Darabont, based on Stephen King's novella, 127 minutes, rated R.
Two of the year's best horror movies have come from works by Stephen King, who knows a few things about the genre that Hollywood seems to have forgotten since losing itself to the entrails provided by directors Darren Lynn Bousman and Eli Roth.
The year's first King adaptation was Mikael Hafstrom's "1408," a horror film that eschewed today's penchant for torture porn and got back to the basics by employing some effective old standbys--shrieking ghosts, scratchy sounds emerging from behind bleeding walls, a sense of claustrophobia that nibbled away at the screen like one of the rats in "Ratatouille."
After the onslaught of Bousman's "Saw" and Roth's "Hostel" movies, "1408" proved a necessary throwback, a movie focused on building character, atmosphere and chills rather than on being merely a gory gross-out.
Frank Darabont's "The Mist," which Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption," "The Green Mile") adapted from King's 1980 novella, follows suit. It's a movie about how a mysterious mist takes rise on the horizon after a storm slams into a coastal Maine town, leaving its residents rushing to repair the destruction left in its wake.
To the supermarket the Maine locals and "those from away" go, including Thomas Jane's David Drayton and his young son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), who offer to give their bitter New York neighbor, Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), a lift.
At the supermarket, a melting pot of the town's townspeople brews, only to be whipped into a froth when the mist crashes into the store, shaking it, and then when a man with blood on his face runs screaming from the mist claiming that something is in it and that they need to shut the doors behind him now.
Has the man gone mad or is there indeed something in the mist? To the film's credit, it allows us sufficient time to be freaked out by not knowing before it unleashes all of the monsters hissing therein.
Of course, nothing in the mist is as terrifying--or as heroic--as what we ourselves can become when pressed by fear. That's the film's point and that's what it reveals so well.
While several characters remain as rational as possible in spite of the odds stacked against them, others waver on the sidelines while another character--Marcia Gay Harden's Bible-thumping Mrs. Carmody--at last finds herself a pulpit and an audience upon which she can unleash her religious rhetoric.
As things grow from bad to worse, so does she, bellowing to the heavens that the end of days is upon them. Only a human sacrifice will placate her god and Drayton's boy, as far as she is concerned, will do just fine.
Beyond Jane and Harden, who do fine work here (especially Harden, who is excellent), the movie offers solid supporting turns from Toby Jones and Laurie Holden, several surprises tucked within the so-so special effects and genre cliches, and an ending that's so good, it proves that even in today's mass-market movies, sometimes Hollywood has the guts to turn a blind eye to the box office, focus on what best serves the story--and just get it right.
Grade: B+
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